Proof That Saddam Bankrolls Terrorism

Even as President George W. Bush and CIA Director George Tenet lay out the evidence of Iraq's operational ties to al-Qaeda terrorists, new documents seized by Israel from Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah and other terrorist operational centers in the West Bank show in extraordinary detail how Iraq has been funding terror and mayhem against Israeli civilians during the last two years.

Among Saddam's victims have been U.S. and European citizens who were visiting Israel. And yet for some reason, as with the evidence showing Iraq's alliance with al-Qaeda, few Western reporters have been willing to pay attention. A notable exception was a report aired Sept. 29 by CBS 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. Citing captured documents provided by the Israelis, she revealed that Saddam's closest deputy, Vice President Taha Yasin Ramadan, personally had signed checks made out to Palestinian terrorist leaders who had organized suicide-bombing attacks.

Since dropping that bombshell, the Israelis have analyzed and offered to reporters hundreds of pages of documents that detail Iraqi money transfers and operational orders to what they now call an Iraqi "terror industry" in the West Bank and Gaza. The evidence is so overwhelming it appears almost mundane.

Captured documents include ledgers of "martyrs" who have carried out suicide operations against Israel, showing how much and when each was paid and the number of the check. It includes internal memoranda, computer disks, hard drives, videotapes and bank statements. In many cases the Israelis managed to seize checkbooks showing the stubs of these payments; in others, they have the actual wire transfers from Iraq.

"We knew all of this many years ago," chief analyst Reuven Ehrlich told Insight as he displayed hundreds of pages of letters, reports, bank statements and lists that showed payments to suicide bombers and their families by Iraq in recompense for murder. "But, until now, the proof has all been classified top secret or above. Now we can finally release the evidence to the public."

So far neither the United Nations nor the European Union has paid attention, despite their support for the extensive networks in Israel and the territories that erupt into strident activity whenever claims are made of an Israeli "massacre." It's not the first time they have ignored hard evidence of Iraqi misdeeds in their eagerness to rehabilitate the Iraqi dictator. Iraq used the Arab Liberation Front and the Ba'ath Party in Palestinian-controlled areas as "payment contractors," Ehrlich says — part of a policy to encourage suicide-bombing attacks. Another organization, the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF), headed by Mohammad Zaydan (aka Abu Abbas), was used by Iraq "as an operational tool for carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel." The PLF hijacked the Italian Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1986, tossing wheelchair-bound U.S. citizen Leon Klinghoffer overboard simply because he was a Jew.

In a rare intelligence scoop, the Israelis managed to capture active members of the PLF who confessed to having traveled to Iraq for military training. "Here you have a case where you have the documents, and then the individuals actually described in the documents," Ehrlich tells Insight at the Defense Ministry's Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center in Herzliyya. While in Iraq, he adds, they received operational instructions "to carry out terrorist acts against Israeli military and civilian targets." One PLF instructor in Iraq had been arrested in Italy during the Achille Lauro affair but later was released.

Insight reviewed some 350 pages of Iraq-related documents in both English and Arabic, in addition to hundreds of pages more on financial aid from Saudi Arabia and direct military assistance from Syria and Iran. The evidence of their involvement in Palestinian terrorist operations is massive, direct and overwhelming.

Once Operation Defensive Shield was launched in retaliation for the Passover massacre that killed 29 Israelis on March 27, the Iraqis made a conscious decision to step up payments to the families of suicide bombers "in order to encourage suicide attacks," the documents show. In a signed, handwritten letter, Iraqi Vice President Ramadan explains in detail how clandestine Ba'ath Party cells in the territories should be organized and designates the Arab Liberation Front as the main "payment contractor" of the Iraqi regime, an Israeli analysis of the documents states. Ramadan reiterates Iraq's eagerness to use Palestinian suicide-bomb attacks to help achieve "the complete liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea," a familiar code-phrase meaning the destruction of the state of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian Arab state.

The Iraqis maintained a hierarchy of mayhem when handing out financial rewards to the families of dead terrorists. Until the Passover bombing in March, the families of suicide bombers were paid $15,000, whereas "ordinary" martyrs got $10,000. Realizing that more money meant more attacks, the Iraqis later upped the price for a "quality" suicide operation to $25,000, the equivalent of several years' wages for an average worker there. The documents show the Iraqis also distinguished between suicide bombers who successfully carried out their missions and those who blew themselves up without killing Jews. In the warped economy of terror, failure has a price greater than death.

At times, the documents have a macabre quality. In an internal memo sent from Jenin on May 9, the local Iraqi representative relays a dispute over how to classify a Nov. 27, 2001, attack against the Afula Central Bus Station in Israel. "The Arab Liberation Front representative in Jenin claims that this attack cannot be described as a suicide attack since its perpetrators did not carry explosive belts," the letter reads. The families of the two terrorists who emptied their automatic rifles into the crowd, killing two and wounding 48 persons, rejected this reasoning. "They insist that it was a suicide operation and demand that it be recognized as such in order to receive the [due] respect and financial rights." If accepted, they will receive a "President Saddam Hussein Grant" of $25,000.

According to the captured documents, the Iraqis show a remarkable ecumenism when it comes to paying the assassins, giving equally to the families of bombers working with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Arafat's own Fatah movement. Often the Palestinian groups themselves appeal directly for the Iraqi grants. In one such case, the Ramallah district office of Fatah issued an official declaration on June 17 certifying that one of its members successfully had carried out a suicide-bombing attack. "The Fatah movement in Ramallah and al-Bireh hereby declares that the martyr Amer Muhammad Issa Shakukani is one of the Intifada al-Aqsa martyrs, who committed suicide during a suicide attack by exploding a car bomb in the Tel Aviv area on 24 May 2002." It worked: The bomber never passed "Go," but his family collected $25,000 from their rich Uncle Saddam.

Captured bank statements of the Iraqi groups showed they had received more than $9 million in direct payments from Iraq during the last two years, with the effect of dramatically escalating the violence. In Arab press accounts, the Iraqis boasted of having spent more than twice that amount to support and promote "martyrdom" attacks.

The captured documents also make it dramatically clear that Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) not only winked and nodded at the Iraqi terror payments but actively encouraged them. "The Palestinian Authority, for its part, enables the Iraqi regime to freely operate in the PA areas via the Arab Liberation Front, the Palestine Liberation Front and the Ba'ath Party," an Israeli military-intelligence analysis states. "It cooperates with Iraq in providing aid to the families of killed and suicide terrorists and enables Iraq to freely disseminate the propaganda messages of the Iraqi regime [hostile to Israel and to the United States] in Palestinian society and media."

When the Israeli army first went into the West Bank town of Tulkarm in early April after the Passover massacre in neighboring Netanya, the mood of the reservists called up from their day jobs was not tender. "We went into PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] offices [with] guns blazing," one Israeli soldier says. But when they came to the computer room of the Tulkarm Zakat Society, the principal Muslim charity the Israelis knew was coordinating terrorist attacks, a 20-year-old computer-science student suggested to his commander that instead of destroying the computers they should extract the hard drives. The rest, as they say, is history.

From those hard drives thousands of pages of documents soon spewed forth, laying out in extraordinary detail a money trail leading from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq directly into the pockets of terrorist commanders responsible for the murders of hundreds of innocents. They were killed on buses, in pizzerias and in discotheques. They were killed in shopping malls and in the streets while coming to the rescue of other victims. They were killed for no other reason than because they were Jews.

When the Israelis released the first set of captured documents seized from PLO offices and "charity" centers earlier this year [see "Documents Detail Saudi Terror Links," May 22], Arafat and his PA initially cried foul. "No longer," says Ehrlich. "Now they are demanding that we return the documents to them, which we have no intention of doing."

The reaction of the Saudis and the Iraqis was "sheer panic," Ehrlich adds. "Each country has its own modus operandi, its favorite groups. The Iraqis work directly with the terrorist cells. The Iranians go through Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The Saudis have been at the game much longer and are much more careful to cover their tracks. They use a whole series of apparently charitable organizations, so they claim that their money has been funding human needs and social services, not terror."

The United Nations and the European Union criticized Israel harshly in April for "reoccupying" Palestinian towns and refugee camps it had evacuated under the Oslo process. But the direct correlation between the Israeli military presence in Palestinian areas and the lack of successful terrorist attacks is overwhelming. "When we go in, we disrupt their networks," one Israeli intelligence officer said. "When we leave, they come back. It's as simple as that."

Witness the attack on an Israeli bus at a junction outside the northern Israeli town of Hadera during rush hour on Oct. 21. Two teen-agers from a nearby Arab town that the Israeli army had left two days earlier under intense international pressure drove a four-wheel-drive vehicle packed with several hundred pounds of explosives into the rear of a public bus that had stopped to pick up passengers. Fourteen Israelis were killed and another 30 wounded. Elsewhere in Israel, bus drivers turned up their radios so the passengers could follow the news minute by minute. It was not a happy time.

"We have three circles of prevention," the commanding officer of Israel's border guards, Maj. Gen. David Tsur, tells Insight at his headquarters outside of Jerusalem. "The first is to intercept terrorist cells using good intelligence and then to attack them in the territories or the security zone where they are hiding. The second is to establish a buffer zone through checkpoints and roving patrols, to keep them from entering Israel. The third is through citizen awareness. We're expanding this circle of security by training private companies who rent out security guards. We have the legal power to close down a mall or a street or a restaurant if we are not satisfied with the security. You don't have that in the United States."

Most public malls in the United States have security guards to prevent people from shoplifting. "In Israel, we check people as they come in. We don't care what they've got as they go out," Tsur says.

PBS Wide Angle: Saddam's Ultimate Solution

James P. Rubin: Well, you've just seen Gwynne Roberts' film. And it raises some very explosive charges. I wonder if you could help us connect the dots. Why should the American people be concerned and what should they think having seen this film?

Richard Perle: Well, the thing that is brought home so clearly in this film is the connection among terrorist organizations now implicating Saddam Hussein directly with Al Qaeda, with a global terrorist movement that ultimately wishes to destroy the United States. What I think we're discovering is that terrorists, like criminals, are in touch with one another around the globe. I think if a safe cracker in Phoenix needs a safe cracker in Manchester, England, somehow they connect (Laughs). And the terrorists are connecting. They're working together, they're reinforcing one another, and they're sharing their tradecraft. And the result is that if we are going to prevail over the terrorists, we have to take them seriously wherever they are and we have to take this war to them in their countries, on their territory. Because if we have to stand and fight on our own territory, many Americans will die in the process.

James P. Rubin: You've been an advocate of intervention in Iraq. And one of the arguments you've used is that if we wait, that someday Saddam Hussein will transfer weapons like biological weapons to terrorist organizations. Having seen the film, do you think there is now a new rationale for early military action against Saddam Hussein?

Richard Perle: Well, the film of course confirms one's worst fears and apprehensions. Because the thing that many of us have speculated about is happening. There is that interchange. It is likely that chemical weapons, biological weapons in the possession of the Iraqis derived during the cold war from the Soviet Union are now being disseminated to terrorists. I don't see how we can ignore those connections that are made so clear in this film. So every day we wait is a day during which a plan may well be forming that could result in the deaths of a great many Americans. Time is not on our side.

So far neither the United Nations nor the European Union has paid attention...It's not the first time they have ignored hard evidence of Iraqi misdeeds in their eagerness to rehabilitate the Iraqi dictator.

They have no desire to rehabilitate Sadam, they are making a fortune from him, he is their Sugar Daddy. So what if the blood of the jews is the cost, as long as Europe gets rich.

Some things never change.

Man this is dynamite!

There is this also:

However, Insight has learned that Israel's internal-security service, Shin Beit, actively is monitoring the activities of several Iraqi agents currently working in Israel. This includes non-Arab foreign nationals who are believed to be gathering intelligence to assist Iraq in targeting Scud missiles against Israel once the U.S.-led coalition strikes Iraq in the coming months.

Thanks for posting this,

This is critical to understand where the left wing mediots and their politicans are coming from in our war of survival against the Islamofascist/kazis:

Among Saddam's victims have been U.S. and European citizens who were visiting Israel. And yet for some reason, as with the evidence showing Iraq's alliance with al-Qaeda, few Western reporters have been willing to pay attention.

Most of the left wing fishwraps and tv outlets over the past two plus decades have been bought out by the Opecker Princes and the Islamofascists like Saddam and the Murdering Mullahs of Iraq. This is why they are doing everything to protect Saddam.

If Saddam falls so does Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia will have to change its ways or go the way of Saddam and the Murdering Mullahs of Iraq. If that happens a lot of dollars that flow into these left wing mediots and their buddies left wing policians and the enviral group will disappear.

When the money from the Opecker Princes and Islamofascists disappears, the left wing will be dealt a crippling blow re loss of financing. It will be so severe, they may not survive.

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