While Barack Obama is out chastising McCain for supporting “Bush’s war”, he seems to be missing some fairly important facts claiming that al-Qaeda was never in Iraq before the war in 2003. That’s all great and everything, except that the facts and the former Iraqi regime disagree. Newly released and translated Iraqi documents reveal a very extensive operation run by Saddam’s regime to recruit, train, and finance terrorism around the world including with the al-Qaeda network and people working within it.
Take these excerpts from a tremendous article found in The Australian:
Newly published Iraqi documents reveal just how extensive Saddam’s involvement with international terrorism was. The summary of these documents, published under the heading Saddam and Terrorism, has been reported across the world and read by almost no one.Its first paragraph reads: “The Iraqi Perspectives Project review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism. Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the US.
These documents, researched and translated by the US Institute for Defense Analyses show a major, extensive effort in Saddam’s Iraq to work with terrorist enemies of the US and Israel around the world.
At times these organisations worked together, trading access for capability. In the period after the 1991 Gulf War, the regime of Saddam Hussein supported a complex and increasingly disparate mix of pan-Arab revolutionary causes and emerging pan-Islamic radical movements.
And yes, al-Qaede is among those he was supporting:
It is reasonable to assume the most sensitive stuff in a paranoid state such as Saddam’s was not written down. George Tenet, the former director of the CIA who became broadly an opponent of the Bush administration, states in his memoir as a matter of plain fact that 200 al-Qa’ida fighters relocated to Iraq with Saddam’s permission. Richard Clarke, who was director of counter-terrorism at the National Security Council on 9/11, and who went on to become a bitter foe of the Bush administration and is advising the Democrats, states as plain fact in his memoir that Saddam had engaged in sponsorship of al-Qa’ida.
200! 200 al-Qaeda terrorists were sheltered in Iraq before the fall of his regime. It only took the Greek 300 soldier to hold of the Persians, and yet Barack Obama thinks that 200 terrorists enjoying the shelter of Saddam (freakin!) Hussein isn’t a big deal!
But don’t worry…no one is hearing a thing about it:
We get too little real journalism about these subjects and too much “churnalism”, in which a single sometimes misleading wire report is repeated by thousands of commentators while nobody bothers to read the source document.
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Acknowledging this support, but saying there’s no smoking gun directly to al-Qa’ida itself, means the report is taking an incredibly restrictive and precise view of al-Qa’ida.
But in any event this report is not claiming, as wrongly reported in the wires, that there was no link with al-Qa’ida, merely that it found no absolute smoking gun in the translated documents.
As Reagan said a while back, facts are stubborn things Barack…stubborn.
Another article (with quick bullet-points) detailing the relationships between Saddam’s Iraq and terrorist groups is here.