Only fools assess as ‘none’ Saddam Hussein’s ties to al-Qaeda. No “smoking gun” direct tie to 9/11 needs found, Saddam and his regime did much to create the conditions for that day of infamy to occur.

More than two years ago, Stephen Hayes reported in The Weekly Standard 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, 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.

While the review of that collection is but one-third completed, the Wall Street Journal characterized the results of the interim report, the redacted version of ‘Saddam and Terrorism,’ [pdf viewer required] this morning:

“The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam’s ‘coercion’ toolbox, not only cost effective but a formal instrument of state power,” the authors conclude. Throughout the 1990s, the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) cooperated with Hamas; the Palestine Liberation Front, which maintained a Baghdad office; Force 17, Yasser Arafat’s private army; and others. The IIS gave commando training for members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the organization that assassinated Anwar Sadat and whose “emir” was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who became Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command when the group merged with al Qaeda in 1998.

At the very least the report should dispel the notion that outwardly “secular” Saddam would never consort with religious types like al Qaeda. A pan-Arab nationalist, Saddam viewed radical Islamists as potential allies, and they likewise. According to a 1993 memo, Saddam decided to “form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia,” where al Qaeda was then working with warlords against U.S. humanitarian forces. Saddam also trained Sudanese fighters in Iraq.

The Pentagon report cites this as “a tactical example” of their cooperation. When Saddam “was ordering action in Somalia aimed at the American presence, Osama bin Laden was doing the same thing.” Saddam took an interest in “far-flung terrorist groups … to locate any organization whose services he might use in the future.” The Harmony documents “reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda — as long as that organization’s near-term goals supported Saddam’s long-term version.”

For 20 years, such “support” included using Fedayeen Saddam training camps to school terrorists, especially Palestinians but also non-Iraqis “directly associated” with al Qaeda, continuing up to the fall of Baghdad. Saddam also provided financial support and weapons, amounting to “a state-directed program of significant scale.” In July 2001, the regime began patronizing a terror cartel in Bahrain calling itself the Army of Muhammad, which, according to an Iraqi memo, “is under the wings of bin Laden.”

It’s true that the Pentagon report found no “smoking gun,” i.e., a direct connection on a joint Iraq-al Qaeda operation. Supposedly this vindicates the view that Iraq’s liberation was launched on false premises. But the Administration was always cautious, with Colin Powell alleging merely a “sinister nexus” in his 2003 U.N. speech. If anything, sinister is an understatement. The main Iraq intelligence failure was over WMD, but the report indicates that the CIA also underestimated Saddam’s ties to global terror cartels.

This much we know about Saddam Hussein and his regime, before and after 9/11:

* they trained thousands of terrorists.

* they harbored Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal.

* they hid and paid an Iraqi who participated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

* they paid the families of Palestinian martyrs “martyrs.”

* they were “willing to co-opt or support organizations” Saddam Hussein “knew to be part of al Qaeda.”

* they tortured, raped, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

* they tolerated the presence in Iraq of the Osama bin Laden funded and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi led terrorist organization, Ansar al-Islam. That group murdered Kurds after 9/11 and before March 20, 2003, then morphed into al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and killed many Americans and Iraqis after our invasion of Iraq.

Those who favor our quick withdrawal from Iraq conveniently ignore the countless lives shattered by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and worldwide promotion of terrorism. That is his contribution to the jihad and what 4,000 of America’s sons and daughters died for — so far and so nobly — to eradicate.

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