Saddam's Terrorist Ties

The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes has been trying for a significant amount of time to get released publicly the captured Iraqi documents (only 2.5 % of which have as yet been translated).

He advises that some are about to be released. And they should put an end to the preposterous claims that the Baathists would never work with the Jihadis.

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.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.

“As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein’s] support for transregional terrorists,” says one intelligence official.

Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: “There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI.”

”[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can’t tell you. I don’t know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I’m just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn’t involved in terrorism is flat wrong.”

Hayes details the great difficulty in getting all this documentation translated and released, and all of us share his frustration. And I wonder if when this batch is released the media will not cherry pick it and underplay the evidence of the links between Saddam’s Iraq and terrorism.

But slow translation of captured , valuable war documents is nothing new. In the 1980’s until the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations started work on them,many captured Nazi documents remained untranslated and virtually unusable for research.

Well, now. Wouldn't that be OPERATIONAL COORDINATION between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which even those who have allowed that there was communication and training have denied (e.g. Senate Intelligence Select Committee)?

Attorney General Gonzales Must Investigate

An open letter from Clarice Feldman @ The American Thinker http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=4109

1 06 06
Dear Mr. Attorney General:

Twice in recent days we have seen published evidence of unethical conduct warranting disciplinary action on the part of FISA judges. Since they have hidden their conduct under a cloak of anonymity, the normal process of filing complaints with the Clerk of the FISA Court is unavailing. Therefore, I ask that you immediately institute an investigation to find out which judges are involved and seek appropriate measures to remove or discipline the judges involved.

Let’s review that evidence briefly:

In his December 16, 2005 article in the New York Times, James Risen says:

According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters.

This suggests that a judge on the FISA court was one of Risen’s sources. If there is any ambiguity, this article in Thursday’s Washington Post, [assuming the newspaper and its reporter have not perpetrated a hoax] establishes beyond peradventure of doubt that some judges on the Court did speak anonymously and in violation of the Code of Judicial Conduct and basic precepts of appropriate judicial conduct to that reporter:

Some judges who spoke on the condition of anonymity yesterday said they want to know whether warrants they signed were tainted by the NSA program. Depending on the answers, the judges said they could demand some proof that wiretap applications were not improperly obtained. Defense attorneys could have a valid argument to suppress evidence against their clients, some judges said, if information about them was gained through warrantless eavesdropping that was not revealed to the defense.

As Andrew McCarthy of the National Review reminds us this is shocking conduct:

First of all, judges speaking to the press regarding matters that may end up in litigation is always a major impropriety, regardless of what kind of matters are involved. Canon 3 of the federal Code of Judicial Conduct expressly admonishes: “A judge should avoid public comment on the merits of a pending or impending action, requiring similar restraint by court personnel subject to the judge’s direction and control.” This is so elementary to fairness and impartiality the hallmarks of the judicial function that it is almost surprising to find a rule about it.

But let’s leave that aside for a second. These are the judges of the FISA court. Of the hundreds of federal judges in the United States, there are, as already noted, less than a dozen specially chosen for these weighty responsibilities. They are selected largely because they are thought to be of unquestionable rectitude, particularly when it comes to things like leaking to the press.

To find federal FISA court judges leaking to the Washington Post about an upcoming closed meeting with administration officials about the highest classified matters of national security in the middle of a war is simply shocking.

Even more mind-blowing, though, is to find them discussing what they see as the merits of the issue. Without having heard any facts or taken any submissions on the governing law and in the cowardice of anonymity here they are speculating for the media about what positions they might take depending on how the administration answers their questions. Here they are preliminarily weighing in on the validity of defense claims in cases where FISA evidence was introduced. This is an inexplicable judicial misconduct.

He’s right. I urge you to act promptly and put the reporters and FISA Judges under oath, to get to the bottom of this apparent flagrant abuse of office.

Linked from Rush's web site: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com

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