Saddam’s Terrorist Links
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece today citing the findings of a recent Pentagon report, which examined the links between Saddam Hussein and Islamist terrorists. Hundreds of thousands of documents found in Iraq have been combed through recently as part of this report. The editors write,
Five years on, few Iraq myths are as persistent as the notion that the Bush Administration invented a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Yet a new Pentagon report suggests that Iraq’s links to world-wide terror networks, including al Qaeda, were far more extensive than previously understood.
I have been making this case to friends of mine and readers of this blog for years. Stephen Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, even wrote an entire book on the contacts between al Qaeda and Saddam. And the 911 Commission found that there were at least contacts, if not an operational relationship, between Iraq and al Qaeda. The editors of the Journal continue,
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.
The editors conclude by pointing out that the Bush administration is not doing a good job communicating the findings of the report to the American people. I guess that is what blogs are for.