The Media and Terrorist Training Camps

The Dots Connect Terrorism: If a trove of documents proved Saddam’s Iraq served as a training ground for al Qaida-connected terrorists, shouldn’t Congress want to know about it? Shouldn’t the administration be making the most of it? [The Weekly Standard’s] Stephen Hayes has spent much of the Iraq War’s duration knitting together this story, only to be ignored by the major media…. Hayes … worked with unclassified documents that few others bothered to touch. It seems that U.S. military intelligence has been processing millions of evidentiary items that link Saddam to Islamic terrorists. According to Hayes’ report, Saddam was training thousands of jihadists: “The secret training took place primarily at three camps — in Samarra, Ramadi and Salman Pak — and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. . . . Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al-Qaida. . . . 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.” … Last November, Michigan Rep. Pete Hoekstra wrote John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, asking for a more complete accounting of evidence found in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. The response was sluggish, reflecting the Defense Department’s understandable reluctance to dump so much documentation on a hostile media. President Bush should pop it open. Americans need to know the evidence, which overwhelmingly justifies stopping Saddam with force. Meanwhile, the media establishment lionizes reporters who reveal secret government surveillance of terrorists….