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Documents show Saddam trained terrorists
Millions of pieces of evidence slowly being translated by U.S.
Posted: January 14, 2006
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Documents from Saddam Hussein's regime that are slowly being translated show Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists at camps inside the country before the war.

The evidence – affirmed in interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders – contradicts the claims of anti-war critics who charge Iraq became a magnet for Islamic terrorists only after the U.S. invasion.

Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard reports that from 1999 through 2002, "elite Iraqi military units" trained about 8,000 terrorists at three different camps, including Salman Pak, where American forces found an airliner fuselage that possibly was used to practice hijackings.

Hayes, who claims more than a dozen corroborating sources, says many of the trainees were from North African-based terrorist groups with ties to al-Qaida.

The U.S. has collected more than 2 million documents, audio and videotapes and computer hard drives, but only about 50,000 of these of these items have been examined so far by a skelton crew with limited resources.

Along with Salmon Pak, the military units trained terrorists at camps in Samarra and Ramadi who, some intelligence officials believe, are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis.

Hayes says that according to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005.

Later, senior Defense Department officials received the same briefing.

A former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents told Hayes there were "boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records – their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information."

"In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?" he asked.

At least a few lawmakers on Capitol Hill think so.

In November, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, asked the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to see a list of 40 mostly unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan.

But by Jan. 5, Hoekstra still had no reply when he spoke with Hayes by telephone.

"I can tell you that I'm reaching the point of extreme frustration," he said. "It's just an indication that rather than having a nimble, quick intelligence community that can respond quickly, it's still a lumbering bureaucracy that can't give the chairman of the intelligence committee answers relatively quickly. Forget quickly, they can't even give me answers slowly."

On Jan. 6, however, Negroponte finally told Hoekstra he is committed to expediting the exploitation and release of the Iraqi documents.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., and Republican Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Pat Roberts of Kansas also have demanded more information on the vast collection of documents.

Santorum and Hoekstra have raised the issue personally with President Bush, Hayes says.

The result of the pressure and subsequent internal debate is the administration has agreed that the vast majority of the 2 million captured documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.

Hayes says Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the documents, but Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita says the main worry is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning.

"There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the (New York) Times or the (Washington) Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to 'prove' that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we'd spend a lot of time chasing around after it," he said.