Posted on 01/06/2006 3:22:52 PM PST by Para-Ord.45
THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.
The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
In case you missed it, Mark Levin read from this Hayes piece on tonight's show.
Betcha no MSM reports this... bastardes. :(
I have heard from numerous and sundry leftist ignorami over and over again that "...there is not one scintilla of evidence that Saddam had anything to do with terrorism and 9/11." Well, you have to agree he is right, not one but 50,000 scintillas unearthed, so far. Did Saddam have anything to do with 9/11? Hey, leftist-freedom and American hating radical, wanna bet your life on that? 2 million documents to go!
These are worthless confessions. Put panties on their heads, they're liable to say anything.
bookmark
bttt
Yes, I suspect the media will try (very hard) to bury this story. Let's hope bloggers and some journalists on Fox, etc., can put this out there for the public to see.
The President needs to mention in some of his speeches--maybe it could be worked into the State of the Union speech?
You are correct that "farmers", who are mostly non-Arab, consider themselves Muslim, my error.
And you are correct that the situation in Darfur is not new.
What is new in the past five years, is oil in the Darfur region (and oils higher world market price) has brought in tons of foreign capital and technology into Darfur (mostly communist Chinese) and it appears that the government in Sudan has exploited the old rivalries in the area by directly arming and aiding the "Arab" tribes as their proxy militias to clear the "rebelious" farmers out of the oil rich region.
This can't be??
Chrissy Matthews keeps telling us there were no terror camps in Iraq before we got there
STILL, some insist on saying it. Since early November, Senator Carl Levin has been spotted around Washington waving a brief excerpt from a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of Iraq. The relevant passage reads: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."
Levin treats these two sentences as definitive proof that Bush administration officials knew that Saddam's regime was unlikely to work with Islamic fundamentalists and ignored the intelligence community's assessment to that effect. Levin apparently finds the passage so damning that he specifically requested that it be declassified.
I (the author of the Weekly Standard article, Stephen F. Hayes) thought of Levin's two sentences last Wednesday and Thursday as I sat in a Dallas courtroom listening to testimony in the deportation hearing of Ahmed Mohamed Barodi, a 42-year-old Syrian-born man who's been living in Texas for the last 15 years. I thought of Levin's sentences, for example, when Barodi proudly proclaimed his membership in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and again when Barodi, dressed in loose-fitting blue prison garb, told Judge J. Anthony Rogers about the 21 days he spent in February 1982 training with other members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood at a camp in Iraq.
[snip]
Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. That he did not do it for ideological reasons is unimportant. As Barodi noted at last week's hearing, "He used us and we used him."
Throughout the 1980s, including the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam cast himself as a holy warrior in his public rhetoric… he launched "The Faith Campaign," which according to leading Saddam Hussein scholar Amatzia Baram included the imposition of sharia (Islamic law).
[snip]
"The government of Iraq is instigating fundamentalism in the country," … "Every party member has to pass a religious exam. They even stopped party meetings for prayers."
And throughout the decade, the Iraqi regime sponsored "Popular Islamic Conferences" at the al Rashid Hotel that drew the most radical Islamists from throughout the region to Baghdad. Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, who covered one of those meetings in 1993, would later write: "Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression."
[snip]
Dickey continued:
Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a "secular Baathist ideologue" who has nothing do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it.
In the face of such evidence, Carl Levin and other critics of the Iraq war trumpet deeply flawed four-year-old DIA analyses.
I hope I haven't used too much original text, but this is important stuff. I wonder what else is in the 98% of documents yet untranslated/unreleased?
Chrissy Matthews, I'm ashamed he came from Philly..LOL
bump
He may have been born in Philly .. but he grew up in the burbs
Just proves, once again, we cannot trust these special commision participants.
I'd love to hear that too, MizSterious.
bookmarked.
If I were Bush, I would NOT permit any broad release of these documents to the MSM who will only misuse the information, "cherry picking" documents which put US policy in a bad light and ignoring those that prove the validity of Bush policy. By once again playing the "Mr nice guy" role with the MSM, Bush will only screw himself. On the other hand, by forcing CIA/NSA to hire analysts who can actually translate this crap (muslims need not apply), and keeping control of the product, the administration can control what is released to the MSM
and pummel (cut off from any release info) those that do not give appropriate distribution of the information. In other words it's about time Bush started playing hard ball with these pr!(ks in the media. And if necessary, just drive them out of business by cutting them off from all sources of info.
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