PROOF OF AL QAEDA IN IRAQ from 1993 to 2003

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Liberal media claims debunked. IDA found a range of connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

When you put liberals in charge of any analytical project in the federal government, you can bet that what they find in 600 thousand pages of Iraqi documents they will easily convert it into a sow's ear. The Institute of for Defense Analyses [IDA], a federally-funded defense think tank in Alexandria, Virginia released its report on 600 thousand pages of Department of Defense [DoD] documents captured from Saddam Hussein's government. The purpose of the DoD report was to answer the question posed by the liberals in Congress: "Was the a connection between former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda that would justify military intervention in Iraq?"

When the synopsis of the report was released a week or so ago, it suggested those studying the documents "...found no smoking gun." Without actually reading the report (not the 600 thousand pages of documents which, of course, were written in Arabic and/or Farsi), ABC News was the first to conclude that "...the report was the first official acknowledgment from the US military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to al Qaeda."

The Washington Post, which was also too busy to actually read the report, apparently felt the content would agree with the view in the synopsis, wrote a brief piece under the heading "Study Discounts Hussein, Al-Qaeda Link." The New York Times band leaders jumped on the band wagon with a similar headline, and Ruppert Murdoch's New York Post chimed the hollow, metallic echo that was supposed to make the story bipartisan.

Which, of course, led to hundreds of emails filling my inbox with a variety of subject lines claiming no al-Qaeda link was found to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq—and personal notes from scores of those emailers reminded me that I was wrong for suggesting since 2003 that there was an al-Qaeda link.

The full IDA report, ordered by the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia and released Thursday, March 13, paints a slightly different picture than the synopsis of those who wanted to paint an anti-al-Qaeda portrait of Saddam's Iraq. The report states there was considerable overlap between Saddam's security forces and al Qaeda in the financing and training of "outside groups" in projects with "shared goals." On page 42 of the report it says: "...Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri) or that generally shared al-Qadea's shared goals and objectives." According to the full text of the study, Islamic Jihad was one of the terrorist groups Saddam funded, trained and equipped.

The captured and examined documents revealed that when US troops were being slaughtered in Mogadishu, Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group that joined in the battle against the poorly armed US troops that were slaughtered in Mogadishu (The Mogadishu incident became the basis for the movie Blackhawk Down. Unfortunately, Hollywood made the fight more even by giving the US soldiers automatic rifles with which to engage the enemy. In reality, antiwar president Bill Clinton stripped those soldiers of everything except sidearms while al Qaeda street fighters were armed with AK-47s.) Even more important, in the months leading up to the US invasion, the IDA report clearly reveals that al-Qaeda was training terrorists in several camps in Iraq.

Also in 1993, Saddam financed a secret Islamic Palestinian organization that was to wage "...armed jihad against American and Western interests." At the same time, and for most of the time that Bill Clinton was in office, Iraqi military leaders trained Sudanese "freedom fighters" to wage jihad against the Sudan's pro-western government. In fact, even before the first Gulf War, the Iraqi military was training non-Iraqi jihadists in secret training camps throughout Iraq. Shortly after the co-presidency of Bill and Hillary Clinton took office and Saddam suddenly lost his fear of the United States, the dictator reopened the desert training camps. (So much for who is qualified to answer the phone in the Oval Office at 3 a.m.) It's only fitting that the sins of the father should visit the mother when she tries to wear the ill-fitting pants of the father. The report went on to say that in 1998 Saddam began to finance jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

On July 9, 2001 the report reveals that Saddam's military intelligence people were financing a group directly under the control of Osama bin Laden which was receiving its instructions from Yemen. Shortly after 9-11 Saddam became even more emboldened and issued Iraqi passports to 699 known or suspected terrorists to help them enter Europe where they could then apply for travel visas to the United States. Only a few months before the US invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein hosted a total of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi terrorist groups. The report made it very clear that Saddam's government knowingly supported organizations it knew were connected to al-Qaeda—providing the organization' s near-term plans dovetailed with Saddam's long-term strategy of bringing down the United States.

Over 1,600 pages of the examined DOD documents were drenched with clear and precise evidence that tied Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government with al-Qaeda, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations that were determined to bring down the free enterprise system of the west. The most damning was a report which detailed how the Iraqi Intelligence Service was handling requests from terrorist groups around the world for inventories of weapons and explosives (plastic explosives and TNT). The Iraqis, using both legal and illegal means, were smuggling weapons and explosives into their embassies around the world for use by terrorists in those countries.

When the erroneous report—first leaked by a McClatchy Newspapers reporter two days before the report was released—hit the wire services, it was incumbent upon the Bush-43 Administration' s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to do damage control. He failed to do so. When the full report hit the street, the antiwar media ignored it and the lame duck Bush team could see no need to fight the battle of media for an administration on its way into the history books, and a president who seems to have little interest in correcting the perception of his legacy.

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