Proof that Terrorists Trained in Iraq Produced

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. [Source]

...not that this is surprising. Anyone that doesn't hate George W. Bush and isn't part of the blame-America-first crowd has already known this for a long time. The big story here is that finally the Bush administration is allowing access to some of the thousands of documents we've found in Iraq that have just been sitting in filing cabinets waiting to be translated. I have no doubt that be the time we've gone through them all, there will be no doubt about the fate of Saddam's WMD stockpiles. At this rate, however, the war in Iraq will be long over by then and it will be a moot point.

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Captain's Quarters -- "Even now, Hayes tells us, only 2.5% of these documents have been translated, and even those rarely get used to investigate anything but the failure to find WMD. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has expressed frustration that the only response he gets when he demands to know the status of expoiting these documents is "we're getting around to it". Yesterday, he got an additional response from John Negroponte, the new Intelligence czar -- it's at the top of Negroponte's list. And that check? Yeah, it's in the mail, Pete."

Michelle Malkin -- "'Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorism. Our invasion has made it one.'--Sen. Ted Kennedy. 'Iraq was not a terrorist haven before the invasion.'--Sen. John Kerry. This is important news. It ought to be on the front pages. It won't be. So spread the word."

Right Wing Nut House -- "This represents an extraordinarily troubling dysfunctionality at the top levels of our intelligence apparatus. Even with the most technologically sophisticated satellites and signals intercept equipment known to man, our “analysts” at the CIA were still unable to uncover a training program from which 2,000 hardened jihadists graduated every year. Could they have been blind to this danger because of stupidity? Or was there something more at work here?"