Saddam trained thousands of terrorists in camps in Iraq: IRAQI DOCUMENTS

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Saddam's Terror Training Camps

What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal--and why they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006,

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.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the "DOCEX" project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. "At this rate," he says, "if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff."

Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group--who were among the first to analyze the finds--considered those items top priority. "At first, if it wasn't WMD, it wasn't translated. It wasn't exploited," says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.



"We had boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records--their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information," says the former military intelligence officer. "In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?"

How many of those unexploited documents might help us better understand the role of Iraq in supporting transregional terrorists? How many of those documents might provide important intelligence on the very people--Baathists, former regime officials, Saddam Fedayeen, foreign fighters trained in Iraq--that U.S. soldiers are fighting in Iraq today? Is what we don't know literally killing us?

ON NOVEMBER 17, 2005, Michigan representative Pete Hoekstra wrote to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Hoekstra is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He provided Negroponte a list of 40 documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan and asked to see them. The documents were translated or summarized, given titles by intelligence analysts in the field, and entered into a government database known as HARMONY. Most of them are unclassified.

For several weeks, Hoekstra was promised a response. He finally got one on December 28, 2005, in a meeting with General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence. Hayden handed Hoekstra a letter from Negroponte that promised a response after January 1, 2006. Hoekstra took the letter, read it, and scribbled his terse response. "John--Unacceptable." Hoekstra told Hayden that he would expect to hear something before the end of the year. He didn't.

"I can tell you that I'm reaching the point of extreme frustration," said Hoekstra, in a phone interview last Thursday. His exasperated tone made

the claim unnecessary. "It's just an indication that rather than having a nimble, quick intelligence community that can respond quickly, it's still a lumbering bureaucracy that can't give the chairman of the intelligence committee answers relatively quickly. Forget quickly, they can't even give me answers slowly."

On January 6, however, Hoekstra finally heard from Negroponte. The director of national intelligence told Hoekstra that he is committed to expediting the exploitation and release of the Iraqi documents. According to Hoekstra, Negroponte said: "I'm giving this as much attention as anything else on my plate to make this work."

Other members of Congress--including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Senators Rick Santorum and Pat Roberts--also demanded more information from the Bush administration on the status of the vast document collection. Santorum and Hoekstra have raised the issue personally with President Bush. This external pressure triggered an internal debate at the highest levels of the administration. Following several weeks of debate, a consensus has emerged: The vast majority of the 2 million captured documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon's role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. "He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop," says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. "There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to 'prove' that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we'd spend a lot of time chasing around after it."

This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting the release of the documents. "Cambone is the problem," says one former Bush administration official who wants the documents released. "He has blocked this every step of the way." In what is perhaps a sign of a changing dynamic within the administration, Cambone is now saying that he, like his boss, favors a broad document release.

Although Hoekstra, too, has been pushing hard for the quick release of all of the documents, he is currently focusing his efforts simply on obtaining the 40 documents he asked for in November. "There comes a time when the talking has to stop and I get the documents. I requested these documents six weeks ago and I have not seen a single piece of paper yet."

Is Hoekstra being unreasonable? I asked Michael Tanji, the former DOCEX official with the Defense Intelligence Agency, how long such a search might take. His answer: Not long. "The retrieval of a HARMONY document is a trivial thing assuming one has a serial number or enough keyword terms to narrow down a search [Hoekstra did]. If given the task when they walked in the door, one person should be able to retrieve 40 documents before lunch."

Tanji should know. He left DIA last year as the chief of the media exploitation division in the office of document exploitation. Before that, he started and managed a digital forensics and intelligence fusion program that used the data obtained from DOCEX operations. He began his career as an Army signals intelligence [SIGINT] analyst. In all, Tanji has worked for 18 years in intelligence and dealt with various aspects of the media exploitation problem for about four years.

We discussed the successes and failures of the DOCEX program, the relative lack of public attention to the project, and what steps might be taken to expedite the exploitation of the documents in the event the push to release all of the documents loses momentum.


TWS: In what areas is the project succeeding? In what areas is the project failing?
Tanji: The level of effort applied to the DOCEX problems in Iraq and Afghanistan to date is a testament to the will and work ethic of people in the intelligence community. They've managed to find a number of golden nuggets amongst a vast field of rock in what I would consider a respectable amount of time through sheer brute force. The flip side is that it is a brute-force effort. For a number of reasons--primarily time and resources--there has not been much opportunity to step back, think about a smarter way to solve the problem, and then apply various solutions. Inasmuch as we've won in Iraq and Saddam and his cronies are in the dock, now would be a good time to put some fresh minds on the problem of how you turn DOCEX into a meaningful and effective information-age intelligence tool.

TWS: Why haven't we heard more about this project? Aren't most of the Iraqi documents unclassified?

Tanji: Until a flood of captured material came rushing in after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom [in October 2001], DOCEX was a backwater: unglamorous, not terribly career enhancing, and from what I had heard always one step away from being mothballed.

The classification of documents obtained for exploitation varies based on the nature of the way they were obtained and by whom. There are some agencies that tend to classify everything regardless of how it was acquired. I could not give you a ratio of unclassified to classified documents.

In my opinion the silence associated with exploitation work is rooted in the nature of the work. In addition to being tedious and time-consuming, it is usually done after the shooting is over. We place a higher value on intelligence information that comes to us before a conflict begins. Confirmation that we were right (or proof that we were wrong) after the fact is usually considered history. That some of this information may be dated doesn't mean it isn't still valuable.

TWS: The project seems overwhelmed at the moment, with a mere 50,000 documents translated completely out of a total of 2 million. What steps, in your view, should be taken to expedite the process?

Tanji: I couldn't say what the total take of documents or other forms of media is, though numbers in the millions are probably not far off.

In a sense the exploitation process is what it is; you have to put eyes on paper (or a computer screen) to see what might be worth further translation or deeper analysis. It is a time-consuming process that has no adequate mechanical solution. Machine translation software is getting better, but it cannot best a qualified human linguist, of which we have very few.

Tackling the computer media problem is a lot simpler in that computer language (binary) is universal, so searching for key words, phrases, and the names of significant personalities is fairly simple. Built to deal with large-scale data sets, a forensic computer system can rapidly separate wheat from chaff. The current drawback is that the computer forensics field is dominated by a law-enforcement mindset, which means the approach to the digital media problem is still very linear. As most of this material has come to us without any context ("hard drives found in Iraq" was a common label attached to captured media) that approach means our great-grandchildren will still be dealing with this problem.

Dealing with the material as the large and nebulous data set that it is and applying a contextual appliqué after exploitation--in essence, recreating the Iraqi networks as they were before Operation Iraqi Freedom began--would allow us to get at the most significant data rapidly for technical analysis, and allow for a political analysis to follow in short order. If I were looking for both a quick and powerful fix I'd get various Department of Energy labs involved; they're used to dealing with large data sets and have done great work in the data mining and rendering fields.

TWS: To read some of the reporting on Iraq, one might come away with the impression that Saddam Hussein was something of a benign (if not exactly benevolent) dictator who had no weapons of mass destruction and no connections to terrorism. Does the material you've seen support this conventional wisdom?

Tanji: I am subject to a nondisclosure agreement, so I would rather not get into details. I will say that the intelligence community has scraped the surface of much of what has been captured in Iraq and in my view a great deal more deep digging is required. Critics of the war often complain about the lack of "proof"--a term that I had never heard used in the intelligence lexicon until we ousted Saddam--for going to war. There is really only one way to obtain "proof" and that is to carry out a thorough and detailed examination of what we've captured.

TWS: I've spoken with several officials who have seen unclassified materials indicating the former Iraqi regime provided significant support--including funding and training--to transregional terrorists, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam, Algeria's GSPC, and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Did you see any of this?

Tanji: My obligations under a nondisclosure agreement prevent me from getting into this kind of detail.

Other officials familiar with the captured documents were less cautious. "As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists," says one intelligence official.

Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: "There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI."

The official continued: "[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can't tell you. I don't know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I'm just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn't involved in terrorism is flat wrong."

STILL, some insist on saying it. Since early November, Senator Carl Levin has been spotted around Washington waving a brief excerpt from a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of Iraq. The relevant passage reads: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."

Levin treats these two sentences as definitive proof that Bush administration officials knew that Saddam's regime was unlikely to work with Islamic fundamentalists and ignored the intelligence community's assessment to that effect. Levin apparently finds the passage so damning that he specifically requested that it be declassified.

I thought of Levin's two sentences last Wednesday and Thursday as I sat in a Dallas courtroom listening to testimony in the deportation hearing of Ahmed Mohamed Barodi, a 42-year-old Syrian-born man who's been living in Texas for the last 15 years. I thought of Levin's sentences, for example, when Barodi proudly proclaimed his membership in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and again when Barodi, dressed in loose-fitting blue prison garb, told Judge J. Anthony Rogers about the 21 days he spent in February 1982 training with other members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood at a camp in Iraq.

The account he gave in the courtroom was slightly less alarming than the description of the camp he had provided in 1989, on his written application for political asylum in the United States. In that document, Barodi described the instruction he received in Iraq as "guerrilla warfare training." And in an interview in February 2005 with Detective Scott Carr and special agent Sam Montana, both from the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, Barodi said that the Iraqi regime provided training in the use of firearms, rocket-propelled grenades, and document forgery.

Barodi comes from Hama, the town that was leveled in 1982 by the armed forces of secular Syrian dictator Hafez Assad because it was home to radical Islamic terrorists who had agitated against his regime. The massacre took tens of thousands of lives, but some of the extremists got away.

Many of the most radical Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Hama were welcomed next door--and trained--in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Spanish investigators believe that Ghasoub Ghalyoun, the man they have accused of conducting surveillance for the 9/11 attacks, who also has roots in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, was trained in an Iraqi terrorist camp in the early 1980s. Ghalyoun mentions this Iraqi training in a 2001 letter to the head of Syrian intelligence, in which he seeks reentry to Syria despite his long affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. That he did not do it for ideological reasons is unimportant. As Barodi noted at last week's hearing, "He used us and we used him."

Throughout the 1980s, including the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam cast himself as a holy warrior in his public rhetoric to counter the claims from Iran that he was an infidel. This posturing continued during and after the first Gulf war in 1990-91. Saddam famously ordered "Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) added to the Iraqi flag. Internally, he launched "The Faith Campaign," which according to leading Saddam Hussein scholar Amatzia Baram included the imposition of sharia (Islamic law). According to Baram, "The Iraqi president initiated laws forbidding the public consumption of alcohol and introduced enhanced compulsory study of the Koran at all educational levels, including Baath Party branches."

Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995, explained these changes in an interview with Rolf Ekeus, then head of the U.N. weapons inspection program. "The government of Iraq is instigating fundamentalism in the country," he said, adding, "Every party member has to pass a religious exam. They even stopped party meetings for prayers."

And throughout the decade, the Iraqi regime sponsored "Popular Islamic Conferences" at the al Rashid Hotel that drew the most radical Islamists from throughout the region to Baghdad. Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, who covered one of those meetings in 1993, would later write: "Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression." One speaker praised "the mujahed Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers." Another speaker said, "Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state." Dickey continued:


Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a "secular Baathist ideologue" who has nothing do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam's version of it.
In the face of such evidence, Carl Levin and other critics of the Iraq war trumpet deeply flawed four-year-old DIA analyses. Shouldn't the senator instead use his influence to push for the release of Iraqi documents that will help establish what, exactly, the Iraqi regime was doing in the years before the U.S. invasion?



Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

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[igloo]

Who Are Those Guys?
Understanding the ties between Ansar al Islam, the GSPC, the Sudanese Islamic Army, and al Qaeda.
by Dan Darling
01/11/2006


SKEPTICS of Iraqi ties to al Qaeda appear prepared to argue that even if Saddam did have substantial connections to Ansar al Islam, the GSPC, and the Sudanese Islamic Army, these relations do not constitute ties to al Qaeda. But unless one is prepared to engage in an extremely legalistic parsing similar to that which has surrounded Abu Musab Zarqawi's relationship with Osama bin Laden, the issue is easy enough to resolve.

Ansar al Islam: As noted by the U.S. State Department, Ansar al Islam "is closely allied with al-Qa'ida and Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi's group." Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported in September 2001 that it was al Qaeda emissary Abu Abdul Rahman who provided Ansar al Islam with $300,000 in "seed money" at its inception. Al Qaeda's close involvement in the formation of Ansar al Islam was likewise demonstrated in an al Qaeda memorandum from August 2001 which was recovered in Afghanistan and reported by the New York Times in January 2003. It noted the existence of the "Iraqi Kurdistan Islamic Brigade" and urged the unification of the various Kurdish Islamist groups based around Shinerwe Mountain in northern Iraq into an enclave modeled after that of the Taliban. After the September 11 attacks, Ansar al Islam was to take on an even more ominous role. As the 2002 Patterns of Global Terrorism noted, "al-Qaida operatives in northern Iraq concocted suspect chemicals under the direction of senior al-Qaida associate Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi and tried to smuggle them into Russia, Western Europe,

and the United States for terrorist operations."


GSPC: In the case of the Algerian Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) and al Qaeda, the connection is even clearer. As Dr. Rohan Gunaratna documented in Inside Al Qaeda, following al Qaeda's falling out with Algerian GIA leader Antar Zouabri, "Osama's displeasure . . . prompted him to forge direct links with the head of the GIA's European network, Hassan Hattab." Following a final schism between bin Laden and Zouabri, "Al Qaeda severed all ties with the GIA leadership, denounced Antar Zouabri, and encouraged Hassan Hattab to break away and join GSPC." Jonathan Schanzer goes even further in Al-Qaeda's Armies, noting that the group was "responsible for financing, logistics, and planning attacks for al Qaeda" and that "since the late 1990s, an immense amount of GSPC activity was reported in Europe, both in support of the GSPC in Algeria, as well as the broader al-Qaeda network."

Nor are the group's actions in support of al Qaeda merely logistical in nature--in June 2003, ABC News reported that a plot by GSPC commander Mokhtar Belmokhtar targeting the U.S. embassy in Bamako, Mali had been thwarted by "a coalition of African anti-terror units." As if to clarify any lingering doubts, in October 2003, then-GSPC leader Nabil Sahraoui issued a statement declaring that the group "strongly and fully support Osama bin Laden's jihad against the heretic America as well as we support our brothers in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Chechnya."

The ongoing connection between al Qaeda and the GSPC continues to play a role in the Iraqi insurgency: The U.S. military announced in June 2005 that roughly 20 percent of the suicide bombers were Algerian in origin. More recently, Italian Interior Minister Giuseppe Pisanu was quoted as saying that three GSPC members arrested in December 2005 in southern Italy "are suspected of being linked to a planned new series of attacks in the United States."





Sudanese Islamic Army: The exact identity of the Sudanese Islamic Army is a bit more murky, but there are two likely possibilities. The first is that the Sudanese Islamic Army refers to bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network (called the "Islamic Army Shura" by the 9/11 Commission report) while it was headquartered in Sudan between 1991 and 1996--though this would seem somewhat counterintuitive given that both the Algerian GIA and later the GSPC were members of the Shura.

It is far more likely that the Sudanese Islamic Army are in fact members of the Sudanese Popular Defense Forces (PDF), which Dutch counterterrorism expert Ronald Sandee has described as a Sudanese "pro-government militia" that "was used to militarily support the power of the Khartoum regime, often taking the brunt of the fighting against SPLA, and later was used in the Numamai Mountains to fight against the Nure people." He notes that "we also see Sudanese who were trained in PDF camps turning up at the border with Israel."

Sandee quotes Sudanese President Omar Bashir as saying, "We now order the Popular Defense Forces and all the political and military leaders to now open all the military camps to be opened in estates and villages. No peace with the Jews or surrender to the Jews, for war is jihad, jihad is jihad." According to the 9/11 Commission, bin Laden "agreed to help [Sudanese political leader] Turabi in an ongoing war against Christian separatists in southern Sudan," activities that would have almost certainly resulted in a close alliance between al Qaeda and the PDF.

Dan Darling is a counter-terrorism consultant for the Manhattan Institute Center for Policing Terrorism.

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Algerian Terrorists, bin Laden & Saddam's Training Camps

From a December 3, 2001 USA Today piece>:

Saddam, under intense international scrutiny after the Gulf War, also had strong ties to Khartoum, and Iraqi intelligence was well represented in the stew of Islamic radicals, insurrectionists and foreign agents pouring through the city.
"We were convinced that money from Iraq was going to bin Laden, who was then sending it to places that Iraq wanted it to go," says Stanley Bedlington, a senior analyst in the CIA's counterterrorism center from 1986 until his retirement in 1994.

"There certainly is no doubt that Saddam Hussein had pretty strong ties to bin Laden while he was in Sudan, whether it was directly or through (Sudanese) intermediaries. We traced considerable sums of money going from bin Laden to the GIA in Algeria. We believed some of the money came from Iraq."


Fast forward to the current Weekly Standard cover piece, "Saddam's Terror Training Camps." Regarding the training of Algerian terrorists, in particular, Stephen Hayes has uncovered the following:

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.


Key Question

By 1997, a splinter group emerged from the GIA (Armed Islamic Group) called the Salafi Group for Call and Combat, or GSPC. But exactly what was the relationship between the GSPC and al Qaeda? Some say not much; others say the GSPC had very close ties to bin Laden. Well, consider what the Center for Defense Information, a liberal think tank in Washington, DC, had to say on the issue of a connection between the GSPC and bin Laden:

The Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) has emerged in recent years as a major source of recruiting and other support for al Qaeda operations in Europe. A splinter faction of the Algerian-based Armed Islamic Group (GIA), the GSPC is engaged simultaneously in efforts to topple Algeria's secular government and to organize high-profile attacks against Western interests on the continent....
Yet more alarming to U.S. and European observers, by 2000, according to Italian investigators, the GSPC had taken over the GIA's external networks across Europe and North Africa and were moving to establish an 'Islamic International' under the aegis of Osama bin Laden. Haydar Abu Doha, a London-based Algerian known as "the Doctor," was instrumental in this reorganization. Abu Doha moved to the UK in 1999 after serving as a senior official in a Qaeda Afghan terrorist camp.

Doha was one of the first to encourage the GSPC to split from the GIA and he helped recruit new terrorists from the large base of disenfranchised Algerian youth in Europe's cities, especially in France. (Algerians to have been among the most numerous militants at al Qaeda's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan before the war.) Many of these new adherents were involved in petty crimes such as car theft, credit-card fraud, and document forgery; and their earnings were now channeled to finance terrorist operations.

Another Algerian, Mohamed Bensakhria, who was based in Germany, and a Tunisian, Tarek Maaroufi, based in Italy, helped Doha establish and coordinate these cells across Europe. They expanded upon the Algerian base of recruits by incorporating radical militants who had left behind dormant conflicts in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan. Bensakhria and Maaroufi also created a vast support network that provided newcomers with false documents, lodgings, and incidental spending money.

In recent years, authorities have foiled an alarming number of terrorist plots across Europe and uncovered cells — many linked in one way or another to the GSPC — in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. Some of the high profile operations planned included a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Paris and Rome, and attacks on the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France and the G-8 summit in Genoa.

Bensakhria was arrested in Spain in June 2002. Maaroufi is wanted in Italy but remains free because of his Belgian citizenship, which prevents his extradition to Italy. Meanwhile, Abu Doha has been connected to Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted for trying to attack Los Angeles International Airport during the millennium changeover, and is currently in British custody fighting extradition to the United States.

Although European and allied authorities have now begun to unearth the myriad connections between these groups and expose their plots, the struggle continues. Most recently French officials arrested four people, two Algerians and two Moroccans, on Dec. 16, 2002, in possession of chemicals and a military personal-protection suit. French authorities say they appear to have been planning a chemical attack. The four were later linked to the GSPC Frankfurt cell.

[destruction]

[bigpoppanils]

links?

[destruction]

Originally Posted by bigpoppanils

links?

Igloo doesn't know what links are.

[igloo]

Originally Posted by bigpoppanils

links?

Are u kidding me? Let's see if I can get you some hints:

-Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
-Dan Darling is a counter-terrorism consultant for the Manhattan Institute Center for Policing Terrorism
-From a December 3, 2001 USA Today piece

I think you may be able to take it from there......and once again, stop conerning yourself more where something appeared, raher than its content...it's one thing if it is nonsense posts from destruction...

[igloo]

Originally Posted by destruction

Igloo doesn't know what links are.

6 words and you still had to edit.....misfit, go away and find some self-esteem you moron

[igloo]

January 13, 2006, 8:11 a.m.
The Butcher with the Terror Ties
The evidence mounts.

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. 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.”

Asked by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R., Mich.) to release some texts, National Intelligence Director John Negroponte reportedly told the House Intelligence chairman: “I’m giving this as much attention as anything else on my plate to make this work.”

Earlier this month, Hayes writes, federal immigration judge Anthony Rogers decided to deport Ahmad Mohammed Barodi, a 41-year-old Arlington, Tex., convenience-store owner. Barodi testified in a January 4-5 hearing that he entered America in 1989 on a phony Syrian passport furnished by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood (SMB), an Islamic terror group. He admitted to smuggling bogus passports into Saudi Arabia for SMB. According to Justice Department records cited by KTVT, CBS’s Dallas station, the SMB sent Barodi to a “21-day guerrilla warfare training camp” in Iraq in 1982, “with the approval of Saddam Hussein.” The document adds: “Barodi advised that the Iraqi government provided all of the training aids consisting of RPG’s (rocket propelled grenades), firearms and the facility.”

But, skeptics sputter, secular Saddam Hussein never would work with Osama bin Laden or other Islamic zealots. This argument foolishly ignores popularly elected Franklin Roosevelt’s alliance with genocidal dictator Josef Stalin to smash Adolf Hitler. Similarly, republican revolutionary George Washington and super-monarch Louis XVI collaborated to defeat Britain’s King George III. Why wouldn’t Hussein and bin Laden similarly conspire to foil the Great Satan?

Moreover, the Butcher of Baghdad was not as secular as the no-connection crowd insists. He added “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great”) to the Iraqi flag just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He also began to pray publicly to bolster his “mosque-cred.” Hayes cites a “SENSITIVE” August 22, 1995, UNSCOM interview with Hussein Kamel, the tyrant’s son-in-law who defected to Jordan that year. Kamel told U.N. weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus, “The Government of Iraq is instigating fundamentalism in the country . . . Now Baath Party members have to pass a religious exam.” He added: “They even stopped party meetings for prayers.”

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney gave Hayes a boost Wednesday. As the vice president told radio host Tony Snow: “Steve Hayes is of the view — and I think he’s correct — that a lot of those documents that were captured over there that have not yet been evaluated offer additional evidence that, in fact, there was a relationship that stretched over many years between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda organization.”

To its enormous detriment, Cheney’s comments notwithstanding, the administration has been nearly silent about Hussein’s decades of collusion with Islamic terrorists. The worry, White House aides tell me, is that revealing these ties would generate media criticism and anti-war catcalls. Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita told Hayes that some reporters might discover exculpatory material among these papers, then “we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”

That risk does not excuse paralysis. If the president wrote MoveOn.org a $10,000 check, they would denounce his penmanship. Bush’s detractors never stop complaining, so the administration simply should make its case. If handed the keys to Fort Knox, don’t worry that someone might whine about the wallpaper. Grab the gold.

Administration officials also should remember that the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal resembled an eccentric one-woman show when reporter Claudia Rosett began exposing it. Then the documents tumbled out. Rosett was vindicated — and how! Worldwide probes, resignations, and criminal arrests followed as the contours of this $21 billion shakedown became clear.

Stephen Hayes similarly remains among the few journalists excavating this huge, deliberately concealed story. Now Newsweek has nibbled at the Iraq-terror connection. Other journalists should stop napping and demand that the White House finally document everything it can about Saddam Hussein’s multifarious links to terrorism.

— Deroy Murdock is a New York-based a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Arlington, Va.. His research on Saddam Hussein’s support for Islamofascism appears at HUSSEINandTERROR.com.

[destruction]

Originally Posted by igloo

6 words and you still had to edit.....misfit, go away and find some self-esteem you moron

[igloo]

Originally Posted by destruction

[img][/img]

It is Saturday, don't you have a Care Bear play group to go to?

[igloo]

The Media and Terrorist Training Camps

From an editorial in today's Investor's Business Daily:

The Dots Connect
Terrorism: If a trove of documents proved Saddam's Iraq served as a training ground for al Qaida-connected terrorists, shouldn't Congress want to know about it? Shouldn't the administration be making the most of it?

[The Weekly Standard's] Stephen Hayes has spent much of the Iraq War's duration knitting together this story, only to be ignored by the major media.... Hayes ... worked with unclassified documents that few others bothered to touch. It seems that U.S. military intelligence has been processing millions of evidentiary items that link Saddam to Islamic terrorists.

According to Hayes' report, Saddam was training thousands of jihadists: "The secret training took place primarily at three camps -- in Samarra, Ramadi and Salman Pak -- and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. . . . Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al-Qaida. . . . 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."

... Last November, Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra wrote John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, asking for a more complete accounting of evidence found in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. The response was sluggish, reflecting the Defense Department's understandable reluctance to dump so much documentation on a hostile media.

President Bush should pop it open. Americans need to know the evidence, which overwhelmingly justifies stopping Saddam with force. Meanwhile, the media establishment lionizes reporters who reveal secret government surveillance of terrorists....

[destruction]

Originally Posted by igloo

It is Saturday, don't you have a Care Bear play group to go to?

It got cancelled so I decided to spend it with you.

[destruction]

Originally Posted by igloo

It is Saturday, don't you have a Care Bear play group to go to?

It got cancelled so I decided to spend it with you.