Tel-Chai Nation

The Weekly Standard (via IRIS Blog and Austin Bay Blog) presents another very good reason why the dictatorship of Saddam had to be brought down:

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.

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.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

One important note that should be made though is that Saddam, whatever way he ran his vicious and vile dictatorship, was NOT a secularist, even if Iraq wasn't literally run under Shari'a law, besides the fact that he kept a Koran with him during his trial hearings. Thus, that's one more flaw in the arguments being made by lot of anti-warrists and moonbats.

Continue reading the whole article by Stephen Hayes for more.

Also available at Adam's Blog, Don Surber, The Mudville Gazette, Stop the ACLU. Others on the subject include Michelle Malkin, The Strata-Sphere, Right-Winged, Macmind, SoCal Pundit, Iowa Voice, Fullosseous Flap's Dental Blog, No Oil for Pacifists, The Larsonian, Small Town Veteran, Sister Toldjah, Preaching Politics, Captain's Quarters, Isaac Schrodinger, No End but Victory, Getting Elected Blogline, Conservababes, ShrinkWrapped, NoisyRoom.Net, Severe Writer's Block, Zero Point, Yippee Ki-Yay, Gina Cobb, Brutally Honest, Rightank, Rhymes With Right, Inaniloquent.Com, Crossing the Rubicon, Flopping Aces, Generation Why, Right Minded, People Covered in Fish, Clark Mountain Musings, The Unalienable Right, CrosSwords, Bear to the Right, Suitably Flip.

Labels: Iraq, jihad, terrorism, war on terror