Saddam's association with terrorism

Eli Lake:

A Pentagon review of about 600,000 documents captured in the Iraq war attests to Saddam Hussein's willingness to use terrorism to target Americans and work closely with jihadist organizations throughout the Middle East.

The report, released this week by the Institute for Defense Analyses, says it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda. But it does say Saddam collaborated with known Al Qaeda affiliates and a wider constellation of Islamist terror groups.

The report, titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," finds that:

• The Iraqi Intelligence Service in a 1993 memo to Saddam agreed on a plan to train commandos from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat and was founded by Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

• In the same year, Saddam ordered his intelligence service to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia." At the time, Al Qaeda was working with warlords against American forces there.

• Saddam's intelligence services maintained extensive support networks for a wide range of Palestinian Arab terrorist organizations, including but not limited to Hamas. Among the other Palestinian groups Saddam supported at the time was Force 17, the private army loyal to Yasser Arafat.

• Beginning in 1999, Iraq's intelligence service began providing "financial and moral support" for a small radical Islamist Kurdish sect the report does not name. A Kurdish Islamist group called Ansar al Islam in 2002 would try to assassinate the regional prime minister in the eastern Kurdish region, Barham Salih.

• In 2001, Saddam's intelligence service drafted a manual titled "Lessons in Secret Organization and Jihad Work—How to Organize and Overthrow the Saudi Royal Family." In the same year, his intelligence service submitted names of 10 volunteer"martyrs" for operations inside the Kingdom.

...

Iraq like many of the state sponsors of terrorism attempted to keep its contacts with terrorist ambiguous. You see a similar patter n in Syria and Iran where ties to the Hezballah terror mastermind where denied until his death when he was then celebrated as a hero. There is a similar pattern in the Palestinian Authority which has been morning the death of four Islamic Jihad terrorist killed by Israel in Bethlehem this week. This denial of responsibility while celebrating their achievements is part of the scheme Muslim countries use to wage war clandestinely against the West and Israel. Those searching for operational control will usually be frustrated, because avoiding responsibility for acts they celebrate is part of the radical Muslim culture. It is why the Palestinians have nothing of value to offer Israel in any "peace" agreement. The left in this country has been the useful idiots of this terrorist policy of these Muslim states.

See also Stephen Hayes comments at the weekly Standard. Ed Morrissey says the report find Saddam connections to two different al Qaeda linked organizations.