Saddam's Terror Training Camps

From The Weekly Standard via Powerline.

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.

Mountains of documents captured in Afghanistan and Iraq in the War on Terrorism have gone untranslated and unexploited for their possible value in the ongoing war. It is estimated that only 50,000 documents have been completely translated in the over 2 million items that have been captured.

Some interesting items to note are that Saddam, despite endless claims to the contrary, was actively engaged in cooperative arrangments with Islamic terrorist groups, both domestic and interregional. The article also discusses the slogging nature of our intelligence gathering departments and how we apparently, aren't as far along in our reforms as we need to be.

Read the articles.