Report Details Saddam's Terrorist Ties
By Rizzuto

Fri Mar 14, 2008 - For years now we've been hearing the same thing over and over again, "Saddam had no ties to terrorism" and "America created terrorism in Iraq". The release of a report titled Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents authored by the Institute for Defense Analysis puts this notion to rest. While the study does state that it found no "smoking gun" linking Iraq operationally to Al Qaeda, it does say Saddam supported known Al Qaeda affiliates and a "wider constellation of Islamist terror groups."

Here are some of the more juicy findings, as found in The New York Sun:
• The Iraqi Intelligence Service in a 1993 memo to Saddam agreed on a plan to train commandos from Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the group that assassinated Anwar Sadat and was founded by Al Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

• In the same year, Saddam ordered his intelligence service to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia." At the time, Al Qaeda was working with warlords against American forces there.

• In 2001, Saddam's intelligence service drafted a manual titled "Lessons in Secret Organization and Jihad Work—How to Organize and Overthrow the Saudi Royal Family." In the same year, his intelligence service submitted names of 10 volunteer "martyrs" for operations inside the Kingdom.

• In 2000, Iraq sent a suicide bomber through Northern Iraq who intended to travel to London to assassinate Ahmad Chalabi, at the time an Iraqi opposition leader who would later go on to be an Iraqi deputy prime minister. The mission was aborted after the bomber could not obtain a visa to enter the United Kingdom.


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RELATED TOPICS: War on Terror | Iraq | ALL TOPICS

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Comments : 1 Comment

GlennJericho commented, on March 14, 2008 at 5:40 p.m.:

Who would have ever guessed that Saint Hussein had ties to terrorism?