The Butcher With The Terror Ties

By: Bootie Cosgrove-Mather

This column was written by Deroy Murdock.

Drip, drip, drip.

Drop by drop, isolated news stories and emerging documents are eroding the popular myth that Saddam Hussein had no connections to Islamofascist terrorists. These revelations undermine war critics' efforts to whitewash Baghdad's ancien regime — such as when Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid declared: "There was [sic] no terrorists in Iraq." Likewise, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) describes a "nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein."

Reid, Levin, and others who dismiss the Baathist-terrorist nexus would struggle to do so if the Bush administration unveiled the evidence tying Hussein to Osama bin Laden and other extremists. President Bush immediately should release papers discussed in the January 9 Newsweek and the January 16 Weekly Standard.

A declassified 2002 Pentagon presentation attained by Newsweek's Mark Hosenball offers fresh details on a suspected April 8-9, 2001, meeting in Prague between September 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) station chief Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. "No other intelligence reporting contradicts that [deleted] report," the heavily redacted document states. It adds: "During one visit, al-Ani ordered IIS finance officer to issue funds to Atta." According to one slide, "Atta also reportedly met with Iraqi Charge d'Affaires Hussein Kanaan." Also: "Several workers at Prague airport identified Atta following 9/11 and remember him traveling with his brother Farhan Atta." (For excerpts go here.)

A slide headlined "High-Level Contacts, 1990 – 2002" lists numerous meetings and communications among bin Laden, his deputies, and top Iraqi officials. In 1999, the presentation says, "al-Qaida established operational training camp in northern Iraq; also reports of Iraq training terrorists at Salman Pak," a military base 20 miles south of Baghdad. In 2000, "According to CIA 'fragmentary reporting points to possible Iraqi involvement' in bombing USS Cole in October."

Among the document's "Findings": "Some indications of possible Iraqi coordination with al Qaida specifically related to 9/11."

Is this all fabricated? How much of this presentation is true? Releasing all 60 or so slides for public inspection would help sort this out.

The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes talked to 11 federal officials before concluding that documents U.S. troops captured in Iraq prove that "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." Hayes reports, "Secret training took place primarily at three camps — in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak — and was directed by elite Iraqi military units." Al Qaeda-affiliated Muslim fanatics, such as Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army, were among the 8,000 or so murderers instructed between 1999 and 2002.

Handwritten notes, typed forms, computer discs, videos, and other "exploitable items" confirm Hussein's philanthropy of terror, Hayes says. But America has translated only some 2.5 percent of this huge cache. Federal officials barely discuss what they have learned. Even unclassified papers remain unavailable. Absurd. Having studied some of these artifacts, one intelligence expert says: "As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists."