Saddam friendly to terror groups

Newly declassified documents show a number of links between the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and violent terrorist or Islamist groups, many of them dating from the early 1990s.

A Pentagon-funded study of the documents failed to find a direct link between Saddam and al Qaeda, the group that carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. But it did establish Iraqi support for Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose leader Ayman al-Zawahri merged the group with al Qaeda years later.

The papers also show that Saddam’s Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) maintained a working relationship with Palestinian terrorist groups, secretly sent representatives to meet with them and trained scores of non-Iraqi Arabs to attack Israel.

“Iraq was a long-standing supporter of international terrorism,” said the report by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a nonprofit private group working under contract to the Pentagon. The institute, whose history goes back to 1947, has three federally funded research and development centers and addresses national-security issues that require specific scientific and technical expertise.

The report, which is being mailed by U.S. Joint Forces Command to the journalists and media outlets, contains copies of the captured IIS documents that provide a detailed picture of Iraq’s decades-old support of various terrorist groups.

Al Qaeda out

Agreeing with previous intelligence reports, the IDA said the documents showed no direct operational link between Iraq and al Qaeda, a connection that had been suggested by the Bush administration before the war. The Bush administration has not been eager to redebate its reasons for the invasion.

Lt. Col. Philip Smith, a Joint Forces command spokesman, said, “The report speaks for itself” and declined to comment further. The Central Intelligence Agency also declined to comment.

A 2006 Senate intelligence committee report said the postwar investigations by the intelligence community found only two confirmed al Qaeda-Iraq contacts. This spurred charges from Democrats that the Bush White House had politicized prewar intelligence.

Since then, government analysts have continued to examine thousands of translated Iraqi documents to get a clearer picture of the Saddam-terror axis. It was in that vein that the IDA wrote its report, “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents.”

Lawrence Korb, an analyst at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the important point in the IDA report is that there was no Saddam-al Qaeda operational link.

“The idea that the same people who attack on 9/11, that Saddam was connected to them, is not true,” Mr. Korb said. “There’s no doubt Saddam was involved with a lot of terrorist groups. A lot of them he used against his own people.”

Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, thinks the new details are “very significant.”

“It demonstrates the intentions of where Saddam was willing to go,” Mr. Hoekstra said. “Were there proven contacts between him and al Qaeda? No. Maybe no. But were there clear indications that this was a guy who was more than willing to support Islamic terrorist organizations? This is one more piece of evidence that shows: yeah.”

Mr. Hoekstra bemoaned the White House’s refusal to highlight the Islamic Jihad-Saddam connection, or, for that matter, recent disclosures that Saddam told his FBI interrogator that he planned to resume production of weapons of mass destruction.

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