Saddam friendly to terror groups

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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."