Rightank

Stephen Hayes reports that the Defense Department has discovered from documents seized during the conquest of Baghdad that Saddam’s thugish regime trained thousands, not 10 or 20, of radical Islamofacists to do what Allah called them to do–terrorize, kill, and murder infidels:

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.

Malkin’s right–this is BIG NEWS. Part of our preemptive rationale for overthrowing Saddam Hussein was his proclivity to finance, harbor, or covertly aid terrorist organizations, including Osama’s Al Qaeda. Evidence that Saddam conducted terror camps, especially if he signed off on any expenses or directed the training, should silence Democrats (e.g., John Kerry) who incessantly claimed that Iraq posed no terrorist threat:

[John Kerry]: And if we’d used smart diplomacy, we could have saved $200 billion and an invasion of Iraq. And right now, Osama bin Laden might be in jail or dead. That’s the war against terror.

Kerry was wrong then and very wrong now. The WMD might have made their way to a weapons oasis in Syria, but, this hard evidence of Iraqi terror camps will surely dampen the spirits of Democrats and radical leftists who opposed the Iraqi war because Saddam they believed he didn’t pose any terrorist threat.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2006 at 7:33 pm and is filed under War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.