Iraq Trained Terrorists Before War; Also Paid Terrorists in Cash

Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism.  Our invasion has made it one.” -- Sen. Ted Kennedy

Oh really?

Anyone who gave it two moments of thought knew from the outset that this statement by Ted Kennedy was flatly wrong from the moment it left his lips.

It was known long before the Iraq "invasion" that Saddam Hussein paid families of homocide bombers $25,000 each time they killed innocent men, women and children in Israel.  Iraq was thus indeed breeding terrorists before Saddam Hussein was removed from power.

That was one reason that I and others were at least somewhat comfortable with removing Saddam Hussein from power whether or not he turned out to have weapons of mass destruction:  He was routinely funding terrorist murder of innocent men, women and children.  He and his regime were also routinely torturing innocent Iraqi people. 

Ah, but Senator Kennedy might say, "it wasn't a breeding GROUND" -- the terrorists didn't physically do their bombings in Iraq.  On Iraq "ground."  They didn't come to Iraq to pick up their checks.

Please.

If that's the argument, it's just plain stupid.

A.  Iraqi soil (or "ground") was no haven of peace and joy before the Iraq war.  It tortured, maimed, imprisoned, and killed its own innocent men, women and children.  (More below).

B.  What we care about is whether Iraq was exporting terrorism before the Iraq war.  The answer is an unqualified yes.  Iraq was funding every homicide attack on Israel by giving cash to the family of every bomber.  Israel, in case you've forgotten, is a reliable American ally and one of the few solidly sane democracies in the Middle East region. 

Fortunately, the U.S. has now added two other sane democracies to the Middle East:  Afghanistan and Iraq.  This is no accident; it is by design of George Bush and his administration, and it will be part of Bush's lasting legacy.

Added to the fact that Iraq routinely funded terrorist bombers before the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein and his minions tortured and killed countless innocent Iraqi men, women and children.  I suppose that this isn't "terrorism" in the conventional sense, but more like old-fashioned murderous dictatorship, but the effects on the civilian poplulation of Iraq were equally horrific.  Anyone who believes that the civilized nations of the world had a moral duty to halt the mass murder of Jewish people in German death camps during World War II would be hard pressed to argue that Saddam Hussein's murderous regime should have been left alone.

But now we know that Senator Kennedy is WRONG AGAIN for yet another reason.  Iraq was also directly training terrorists. (More below).

Here's a quote from another prominent Democratic leader:

"Iraq was not a terrorist haven before the invasion." -- Sen. John Kerry

Really?

Iraq certainly was a terrorist "haven" in the sense that it provided $25,000 to every terrorist's family for killing innocent men, women and children in Israel and tortured and murdered its own people.

If this statement again depends for its supposed truth on the "nuances" of the word "haven," it is once again silly and misleading.

The fact that the homicide bombers paid large sums of cash by Iraq did not phsyically move to Iraq is completely irrelevant, particularly since the whole point was for them to blow themselves up so that they would require no further place of residence (in this world anyway).  These terrorists were strongly encouraged by Iraq and received blood money from Iraq for their homicides.

Was Iraq regularly car bombing its own civilians before Saddam Hussein was removed from power?  No, that wasn't necessary -- it was regularly abducting them, imprisoning them indefinitely without cause, torturing them, occasionally gassing them, and frequently murdering them at rates that far exceed the current civilian death rate in Iraq.

But now there's more.  According to a new report in the Weekly Standard by Stephen Hayes, documents found in post-war Iraq confirm earlier reports that Saddam Hussein also actively funded and trained Islamic terrorists:

"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."

Michelle Malkin has much more on this subject.  She notes that, "This is important news. It ought to be on the front pages. It won't be.  So spread the word."

You heard her.  Spread the word.  To recap: 

Saddam Hussein's Iraq trained 8,000 or more terrorists from 1999 to 2002 on Iraqi soil, many with close ties to Al Qaeda.  So, yes, Iraq was a breeding ground for terrorism before the Iraq war.  And a major funder of terrorism as well.

In removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, America's troops and their commander in chief George Bush did the right thing.

Don't let people who have deliberately closed their eyes to the facts tell you any differently.

Comments

[Mark Eichenlaub]

Excellent work you've done here.

Thought you might want to know that a former 20 year DIA intel analyst just came out to challenge the conventional wisdom as well
http://regimeofterror.com/archives/2007/07/former_dia_analyst_challenges_1/

Also, from now on I’d like to link to all bloggers who talk to this issue when they do a new post (as you have in the past). Can you please email me when something new comes up so I can link you at www.regimeofterror.com ?
Thanks,
Mark

[Gina Cobb]

Eric, that's a good attempt at a rebuttal, but I see some problems with it.

The article you are using is nearly two years old, from March 2004. It also states that part of its basis was a report last updated in January 2003, before the Iraq war. In other words, some or all of the information you are relying on is actually three years old now.

The information reported by the Weekly Standard and cited by Michelle Malkin is based on documents that came to light AFTER the war and which did not receive immediate focus because the initial focus was on weapons. The remaining documents -- a collection of some 2 million items -- are still being reviewed. They reflect the existence of the terror camps (see Michelle Malkin's link above, which takes you to the original source in the Weekly Standard). Also, there are many more documents still in the process of being analyzed -- only about 2.5% of the 2 milion documents have been reviewed so far. There is much more that will be learned.

I also have a little bit of problem with the excerpt you cited because it's based entirely on an unknown number of "anonymous sources" and, on top of that, it's fairly vague. However, I don't doubt that we did not know before the Iraq war that 8,000 or so men had being trained as terrorists in Iraq. My main problem with the Knight Rider article you shared is that it's out of date. It ignores the new documents that have come to light, which is what the current story is about.

However, I don't fault you for posting it here. If you find anything more current that involves these specific documents reflecting the 8,000 terrorists trained, please do post it here so that we can analyze it together.

Honest debate is always good. The truth usually emerges from an honest sharing of conflicting ideas.

The article also does not deal with Saddam Hussein's $25,000 per terrorist funding of homicide bombers who killed innocent men, women and children in Israel. I don't give Saddam Hussein a free pass just because the targets of his export of terrorism were Israeli. (Sadly, I think that some people do, consciously or subconsciously. discount the gravity of deliberately targeting innocent men, women and children for murder if the victims are Jewish or Israeli.) Deliberate homicide bombing of innocent men, women and children, along with Saddam Hussein's torture and murder of large numbers of Iraq's own civilians -- is about as evil as you can get.

Based on these facts, Saddam Hussein clearly was a sponsor of terrorism, in Iraq and Israel and, now we know, in other places as well. Thankfully, now that Saddam Hussein is behind bars, he can no longer pay Palestinians for killing themselves and murdering innocent Israelis, nor can he and his thugs torture, gas, and execute Iraq's innocent people, nor can his regime train the next 8,000 terrorists for terror operations elsewhere in the world. The world is a better place with this leader of heinous terrorism behind bars.

[Eric]

Tues. Mar. 2, 2004
Doubts cast on efforts to link Saddam, al-Qaida

By Warren P. Strobel, Jonathan S. Landay and John Walcott
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration's claim that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaida - one of the administration's central arguments for a pre-emptive war - appears to have been based on even less solid intelligence than the administration's claims that Iraq had hidden stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

Nearly a year after U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq, no evidence has turned up to verify allegations of Saddam's links with al-Qaida, and several key parts of the administration's case have either proved false or seem increasingly doubtful.

Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence that Saddam's secular police state and Osama bin Laden's Islamic terrorism network were in league. At most, there were occasional meetings.

Moreover, the U.S. intelligence community never concluded that those meetings produced an operational relationship, American officials said. That verdict was in a secret report by the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence that was updated in January 2003, on the eve of the war.

"We could find no provable connection between Saddam and al-Qaida," a senior U.S. official acknowledged. He and others spoke on condition of anonymity because the information involved is classified and could prove embarrassing to the White House.