Did Saddam Hussein Assist Palestinian Terrorist Groups More Than Previously Thought?

By Andrew Cochran

On January 7, I discussed the potential disclosure of up to 2 million documents from Saddam Hussein's intelligence apparatus and whether it would lead to a reassessment of his ties to Islamic terrorist groups. I expressed hope that the documents would be "seriously examined, analyzed, and released to the public" and that "counterterrorism experts with knowledge of terrorist groups and individuals, from inside and outside government, should be invited to review the evidence." The first group of 600-700 have been released by the Director of National Intelligence and are available from the website of the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth. Concurrently the U.S. Joint Forces Command released the unclassifed version of its "Iraq Perspectives Project" (large Acrobat file), a two-year effort in which information from interviews with senior Iraqi military and political leaders and thousands of official Iraqi documents were analyzed to determine the forces and motivations behind the Hussein regime's pre-war and wartime decisions. (EDIT: The U.S. House oversight subcommittee which reviewed UBS's currency violations this week will hold a hearing next week on this report.)

The IPP authors carefully tried to authenticate the statements in the report. "Some things we did not use in the study because we could not find multiple ways of identifying was it true or not true. We explicitly excluded them...Then there's the plausibility factor of does it make sense militarily, is this possible the way they described it? Some of the stories were not so we left those off."

More evidence of Saddam's ties to terrorist groups has already emerged from these releases. One of the docs from Saddam's intel stash apparently points toward funding of Abu Sayyaf, the Filippino-based terrorist group. One paragraph on page 54 of the IPP has drawn attention to Saddam's possible ties and cooperation with Islamic terrorist groups, especially those with a Palestinian focus. We already knew that Saddam had funded Palestinian suicide bombers through an account in Rafidain Bank in Jordan, but this paragraph extends the possible range of such assistance. Even those in the CT community (official and otherwise) and the "terrorism press" who are highly skeptical of claims of the value of the intel docs are intrigued by the following paragraph:

Beginning in 1994, the Fedayeen Saddam opened its own paramilitary training camps for volunteers, graduating more than 7,200 "good men racing full with courage and enthusiasm" in the first year. Beginning in 1998, these camps began hosting "Arab volunteers from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, 'the Gulf,' and Syria." It is not clear from available evidence where all of these non-Iraqi volunteers who were "sacrificing for the cause" went to ply their newfound skills. Before the summer of 2002, most volunteers went home upon the completion of training. But these camps were humming with frenzied activity in the months immediately prior to the war. As late as January 2003, the volunteers participated in a special training event called the "Heroes Attack." This training event was designed in part to prepare regional Fedayeen Saddam commands to "obstruct the enemy from achieving his goal and to support keeping peace and stability in the province.

The authors don't cite their sources, and I hope more of the details behind this paragraph emerge.

Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who along with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra has pushed for the release of the intel docs, cited this paragraph this week in remarks on the Senate floor. And he said this about the intel documents:

As a caveat, while Congressman Hoekstra and I are excited about the fact that DNI decided to release these documents, the pace of the release is, let us say, unsatisfactory to this point. We have, with the blogosphere, the Internet, the opportunity to put these documents out there and have almost instantaneously translated postings about what these documents contain. During the time the Director of National Intelligence Negroponte has had these documents--this is 3 years ago--less than 2 percent of the documents have been translated. At this pace, my grandchildren may know what is in these documents. We need to get these documents out. Mr. President, 600 over a little over a 2-week period is almost the same pace as translating with the people they had over in DNI Negroponte's shop. We need to get these documents out quicker. Why? Because if we look at what is in these documents, there is important information in understanding the connection between Iraq and terrorist organizations and the threat we were facing...

Obviously questions of authenticity and the chain of custody of the intel docs have to be carefully addressed, just as the IPP authors did in their work. Reporter Stephen Hayes, while championing their release, recently cautioned readers about this. "Determining which documents are authentic and which are not will be an incredibly important task. This will be difficult task too, since many of the documents have no known chain of custody. There was a bustling black market for forged documents in Baghdad after the war. How will we determine which documents are real and which documents are not?"

So the quest continues. I understand that a number of non-governmental CT experts, including at least one of our Contributing Experts, have been asked for their assistance, as I hoped in January. We should hope that the authentic and supported documents from Saddam's intel stash are eventually disclosed, with final conclusions about all commections or the lack thereof, before too long.

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