In discussing last week’s fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, many mainstream media journalists were quick to tout a new Pentagon report supposedly proving there was “no connection” between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. Those journalists were dead wrong. The report actually shows many links between the two, plus abundant other examples of direct support from Saddam for a wide variety of international terrorists.
Credit for correcting the false media stories goes to Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard, who noted that the exhaustive review actually showed Saddam’s direct support — funding, training, equipping, arming — for a group called Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was led by bin Laden’s powerful and now-infamous deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
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Atother times, Saddam directly supported other terrorist organizations that “would work together [with al Qaeda] in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence.” And an official Iraqi document from 1993 reports years of “good relations” with the Afghan Islamic Party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, for whom Saddam provided financial support. Who is Hekmatyar? He’s the man described by terrorism analyst Peter Bergen as bin Laden’s “alter ego,” who hosted al Qaeda’s terrorist training camps in the eastern part of Afghanistan.
And Hayes reports that one of the two main co-authors of the Pentagon study, a completely independent investigator named James Lacey, himself complained in writing to the Pentagon press office that “the document is being misrepresented” by the media.
To judge for yourself, the report can be viewed at a.abcnews.com/images/pdf/Pentagon_Report_V1.pdf. After the Executive Summary, note the very first sentence of the full report: “Under Saddam, the Iraqi regime used its paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam training camps to train terrorists for use inside and outside Iraq.” Page after page, all taken from internal Iraqi documents, detail direct support from Saddam to terrorist organizations and leaders. One set of documents shows high-level approval for providing support for The Army of Muhammad, which was identified by an Iraqi agent as “an offshoot of bin Laden” and “under the wings of bin Laden.”
In short, the only thing the media reports got right was that the Pentagon study showed no “smoking gun” of Saddam sitting down to dinner with bin Laden to plan 9/11. But there are numerous bull’s-eyes showing Saddam was an energetic supporter of terrorism, including terrorism he knew was carried out by bin Laden’s accomplices. And that was reason enough to sideline Saddam Hussein for good.
