Say Anything Blog

By Debra Baker

Claims that there were no links between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda are wrong. Documents just released by the Pentagon prove it.

In March 2008, the Pentagon released a document that details some of the classified documents from Saddam’s regime.  This document called the Iraqi Perspectives Project Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents Volume 1 (Redacted) is an overview of “more than 600,000 original captured documents and several thousand hours of audio and video footage archived in a US Department of Defense (DOD) database. As of August 2006, only 15 percent of the captured documents have English translations."[1] This document provides insight into how Saddam operated his regime and his ties to terrorism.

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Saddam and State Terrorism

Saddam was in the business of terror. From the recruitment, training, financing, and support of terrorism, Saddam formed an alliance with terror.  Of course Saddam obtained control of Iraq via his terrorist Baath party, but the Pentagon Papers on Saddam reveal much more to Saddam’s terrorist ties.  The UN sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War,

“reduced Saddam’s ability to shape regional and world events, steadily draining his military, economic, and military powers. The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam’s “coercion” toolbox, not only cost effective but a formal instrument of state power."[10]

The UN sanctions were working, but Saddam being resourceful saw the jihadist movement as a vehicle to carry out his anti-American and anti-Israeli actions.

Terrorist Training Camps in Iraq

Saddam had terrorist training camps within Iraq.  The Pentagon report on Saddam goes on to say that “captured Iraqi archives reveal that Saddam was training Arab fighters (non-Iraqi) in Iraqi training camps more than a decade prior to Operation Desert Storm (1991).  A Saddam memorandum directed the IIS to submit a list of foreign nationals who were trained in Iraq and carried out operations during the 1991 war against the United States.  In response, the IIS sent a list of one-hundred names of foreign national fighters, categorized by country"[11]

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The Pentagon papers only stated the EIJ link, not specifically the al-Qaeda link.  The second in command of al-Qaeda and the person who masterminded 9/11 is Ayman al-Zawahiri.  Ayman al-Zawahiri was the leader of the EIJ prior to its 1998 merging with al-Qaeda.  This truth has been subverted by the media.  All the major media outlets have just quoted what is written in the Executive Summary of the document which states that there is no “smoking gun[18].” But upon further investigation of the EIJ, a direct link between al-Qaeda and Saddam’s Iraq is seen.

The truth is out there.  Read the whole thing, which includes an exhaustive bibliography.