The Iraqi terror connection

Rowan Scarborough:

Newly declassified documents show a number of links between the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and violent terrorist or Islamist groups, many of them dating from the early 1990s.

A Pentagon-funded study of the documents failed to find a direct link between Saddam and al Qaeda, the group that carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. But it did establish Iraqi support for Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose leader Ayman al-Zawahri merged the group with al Qaeda years later.

The papers also show that Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) maintained a working relationship with Palestinian terrorist groups, secretly sent representatives to meet with them and trained scores of non-Iraqi Arabs to attack Israel.

"Iraq was a long-standing supporter of international terrorism," said the report by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a nonprofit private group working under contract to the Pentagon. The institute, whose history goes back to 1947, has three federally funded research and development centers and addresses national-security issues that require specific scientific and technical expertise.

The report, which is being mailed by U.S. Joint Forces Command to the journalists and media outlets, contains copies of the captured IIS documents that provide a detailed picture of Iraq's decades-old support of various terrorist groups.

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Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, thinks the new details are "very significant."

"It demonstrates the intentions of where Saddam was willing to go," Mr. Hoekstra said. "Were there proven contacts between him and al Qaeda? No. Maybe no. But were there clear indications that this was a guy who was more than willing to support Islamic terrorist organizations? This is one more piece of evidence that shows: yeah."

Mr. Hoekstra bemoaned the White House's refusal to highlight the Islamic Jihad-Saddam connection, or, for that matter, recent disclosures that Saddam told his FBI interrogator that he planned to resume production of weapons of mass destruction.

"It just points out from my standpoint how pathetic this administration has been in really talking to the American people about the threat from radical jihadists in general and what was going on in Iraq in particular," he said.

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Perhaps the IDA report's most significant new disclosure is that the Iraqi Intelligence Service, known as the Mukhabarat, established an alliance with Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ). A captured 1993 memo from the IIS to Saddam said that Iraq had aided the group previously and was restarting contacts to help with attacks on the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally.

EIJ was founded by Zawahri, an Egyptian surgeon who, along with other members, sought to overthrow the secular Egyptian government. After the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, he was arrested but served jail time only for illegal arms possession. He met bin Laden in Afghanistan while with the mujahedeen resistance fighting the Soviets. He returned to Egypt in 1990 and, in 1998, merged Egyptian Islamic Jihad with al Qaeda.

In 1996, he was arrested in Russia for recruiting Chechen jihadists, but Russian officials released him, saying they couldn't confirm his identity. Zawahri, who is on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list for his role in the September 11 attacks, also has been indicted in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

"In a meeting in the Sudan, we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt," the Iraqi memo states. "It carried out numerous successful operations, including the assassination of Sadat. We have previously met with the organization's representative and we agreed on a plan to carry out commando operations against the Egyptian regime."

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There is more including Iraq's connection to Palestinian terrorist including giving sanctuary to some notorious terrorist. For some reason the left seems to think it is important that there was no operational relationship at the time with al Qaeda which really glosses over the rationale for the war. That rationale was that in a post 9-11 world we could not take the chance that Saddam would establish those operational relationships and provide al Qaeda with WMD. What this report demonstrates is that the had the means and the will to do just that.