Saddam's Past Terrorism Connections Have Future Consequences
By Andrew Cochran
A U.S. House oversight subcommittee conducts the first public hearing today on the lessons gleaned from the first review of the vast storehouse of Saddam's intelligence documents. They will hear today from two military officers involved in the preparation of the Iraq Perspectives Project (see my post on it earlier) and from an official of the Director of National Intelligence, and Congressmen will also discuss the release of documents by the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office at Ft. Leavenworth, which has been the subject of numerous articles and columns. The skepticism in official IC circles with respect to the value of these documents remains, but we should recall that (a) committed and careful terrorists not only don't die, but they never fade away either; and (b) the IC, including the FBI, missed the use of U.S.-based Islamic charities in the 1980s and 1990s to fund Islamic terrorism. The work uncovering those charities' terrorism-funding activities was done by private-sector experts, especially Steven Emerson and his Investigative Project on Terrorism, and that work is the basis for criminal investigations even now. For instance, the KindHearts charity recently nailed by the Treasury Department is "the progeny" (Treasury's words) of the Holy Land Foundation in Texas and the Global Relief Foundation in Chicago. I'm quite confident that Steve Emerson knows more about the history and principals of those three charities than anybody else in the world.
So we need to know what happened to the thousands of graduates of Saddam's terrorism academies between 1994 and 2003 (citing page 54 of the IPP). The Moussaoui case and the release of 9/11 emergency tapes again remind us that it only takes 19 committed and trained terrorists to cause massive death and destruction. It would be grossly negligent to not obtain and pursue documentation of the names, countries of origin, and ultimate destination of each of Saddam's graduates.
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