So, Saddam Did Support Terrorist Training Camps. So what? Bush Is Still Wrong!

So much for the cowardly left’s claim that we had no right to topple the legitimate dictatorship of Saddam Hussein since he had no clear ties to terrorism. According to an article found here, mountains of documents and other evidence were captured in both Afghanistan and Iraq and as it turns out they expose the truth that Saddam was in fact helping to train thousands of terrorists.

This also debunks the left’s argument that Saddam was a secularist and as such would have had no relations with any Islamic terrorist nor they with he.

Here are some highlights from Stephen F. Hayes’ article:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. 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; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.

The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million "exploitable items" captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.

The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million "exploitable items" have been thoroughly examined. That's 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the "DOCEX" project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. "At this rate," he says, "if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff."

Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group--who were among the first to analyze the finds--considered those items top priority. "At first, if it wasn't WMD, it wasn't translated. It wasn't exploited," says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.

"We had boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records--their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information," says the former military intelligence officer. "In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?"

How many of those unexploited documents might help us better understand the role of Iraq in supporting transregional terrorists? How many of those documents might provide important intelligence on the very people--Baathists, former regime officials, Saddam Fedayeen, foreign fighters trained in Iraq--that U.S. soldiers are fighting in Iraq today? Is what we don't know literally killing us?

With a mountain of such voluminous information still remaining to sift through, there’s no telling what else we might learn. Saddam might have had even more WMDs than we have already found, after all.

Despite this overwhelming evidence don’t expect the left to detract their fallacious arguments against President Bush’s campaign to liberate the citizens of Iraq from the monstrous dictator that was torturing and killing them on a daily basis. The left is all about hating Bush. Even if we win the war on terror and Iraq’s new democratic government stabilizes both itself and the Middle East, they will continue to declare Bush to be the reincarnation of Hitler, or the world’s most dangerous dictator or, even more absurdly – as old “Day-O" himself, Harry Belafonte, calls Bush: a terrorist.

That their arguments are being exposed as nonsense is irrelevant to them. It’s all about defending their ideals, regardless if their case is only propped up with lies and unconfirmed assumptions. That they are in defense of a regime that clearly grievously violated the human rights of its people is beyond them. After all, aren't human rights suppose to be one of the left's adopted campaigns that they have the corner of the market on?

It’s not really all that surprising though. The left is for human rights in name only. It serves to dupe it’s followers into thinking that they care. Clearly they don’t. They only care about getting Saddam back on his throne again and our troops out of Iraq as soon as possible. Human rights be damned! Let the tortures resume. The failure of Bush in Iraq is worth the slaughter of Iraqis to the "compassionate", "enlightened", "intellectual" left.

Oh, and while we are on the topic of fallicious arguments from the left, according to Michael Leedon in his article found here, Iran claims that Osama Bin Laden, died of kidney failure and was buried in mid-December within Iran, where he had been living since the U.S.’s demolition of the Taliban in Afghanistan. If this turns out to be true, expect the cowardly left to start crying that since Bin Laden is dead, Bush’s “War on Terror” is officially over, and for Bush to not bring the troops home as fast as humanly possible will just support their opinion of him as being a power hungry dictator.

Hopefully, a majority of the U.S. voters out there will find yet another reason to vote the dangerous, cowardly left out of office.

Those left within Western Civilization who care about democracy and liberty and care about human rights and who are determined to never allow another 9/11 or 7/11 to occur again know that the left is the enemy of our civilization and need to relegated to the outer fringes where they can disappear with a whimper.

The left has been in the spotlight for far too long. Their appeasment mentality has served to embolden our enemy. Western civilization under their flag and guidance will continue to be weak and indecisive a perfect target for Islamic terrorist who see the weak as something to be conquered or exterminated.