|
Guest
|
OT: Captured Iraqi documents reveal Terror training camps
Saddam's Terror Training Camps
What the documents captured from the former Iraqi regime reveal--and why
they should all be made public.
by Stephen F. Hayes
01/16/2006, Volume 011, Issue 17
[url]http://tinyurl.com/c7njm[/url]
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.
page 2 of 2
"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?
ON NOVEMBER 17, 2005, Michigan representative Pete Hoekstra wrote to John
Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Hoekstra is chairman of
the House Intelligence Committee. He provided Negroponte a list of 40
documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan and asked to see them.
The documents were translated or summarized, given titles by intelligence
analysts in the field, and entered into a government database known as
HARMONY. Most of them are unclassified.
For several weeks, Hoekstra was promised a response. He finally got one on
December 28, 2005, in a meeting with General Michael Hayden, principal
deputy director of national intelligence. Hayden handed Hoekstra a letter
from Negroponte that promised a response after January 1, 2006. Hoekstra
took the letter, read it, and scribbled his terse response.
"John--Unacceptable." Hoekstra told Hayden that he would expect to hear
something before the end of the year. He didn't.
"I can tell you that I'm reaching the point of extreme frustration," said
Hoekstra, in a phone interview last Thursday. His exasperated tone made
the claim unnecessary. "It's just an indication that rather than having a
nimble, quick intelligence community that can respond quickly, it's still
a lumbering bureaucracy that can't give the chairman of the intelligence
committee answers relatively quickly. Forget quickly, they can't even give
me answers slowly."
On January 6, however, Hoekstra finally heard from Negroponte. The
director of national intelligence told Hoekstra that he is committed to
expediting the exploitation and release of the Iraqi documents. According
to Hoekstra, Negroponte said: "I'm giving this as much attention as
anything else on my plate to make this work."
Other members of Congress--including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Senators
Rick Santorum and Pat Roberts--also demanded more information from the
Bush administration on the status of the vast document collection.
Santorum and Hoekstra have raised the issue personally with President
Bush. This external pressure triggered an internal debate at the highest
levels of the administration. Following several weeks of debate, a
consensus has emerged: The vast majority of the 2 million captured
documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent
weeks to discuss the Pentagon's role in expediting the release of this
information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking,
Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured
documents. "He has a sense that public vetting of this information is
likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop,"
says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.
The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might
cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. "There is always
the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad,
and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some
sensational-sounding document that would seem to 'prove' that sanctions
were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some
other nonsense, we'd spend a lot of time chasing around after it."
This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be
interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting
the release of the documents. "Cambone is the problem," says one former
Bush administration official who wants the documents released. "He has
blocked this every step of the way." In what is perhaps a sign of a
changing dynamic within the administration, Cambone is now saying that he,
like his boss, favors a broad document release.
Although Hoekstra, too, has been pushing hard for the quick release of all
of the documents, he is currently focusing his efforts simply on obtaining
the 40 documents he asked for in November. "There comes a time when the
talking has to stop and I get the documents. I requested these documents
six weeks ago and I have not seen a single piece of paper yet."
Is Hoekstra being unreasonable? I asked Michael Tanji, the former DOCEX
official with the Defense Intelligence Agency, how long such a search
might take. His answer: Not long. "The retrieval of a HARMONY document is
a trivial thing assuming one has a serial number or enough keyword terms
to narrow down a search [Hoekstra did]. If given the task when they walked
in the door, one person should be able to retrieve 40 documents before
lunch."
Tanji should know. He left DIA last year as the chief of the media
exploitation division in the office of document exploitation. Before that,
he started and managed a digital forensics and intelligence fusion program
that used the data obtained from DOCEX operations. He began his career as
an Army signals intelligence [SIGINT] analyst. In all, Tanji has worked
for 18 years in intelligence and dealt with various aspects of the media
exploitation problem for about four years.
We discussed the successes and failures of the DOCEX program, the relative
lack of public attention to the project, and what steps might be taken to
expedite the exploitation of the documents in the event the push to
release all of the documents loses momentum.
TWS: In what areas is the project succeeding? In what areas is the project
failing?
Tanji: The level of effort applied to the DOCEX problems in Iraq and
Afghanistan to date is a testament to the will and work ethic of people in
the intelligence community. They've managed to find a number of golden
nuggets amongst a vast field of rock in what I would consider a
respectable amount of time through sheer brute force. The flip side is
that it is a brute-force effort. For a number of reasons--primarily time
and resources--there has not been much opportunity to step back, think
about a smarter way to solve the problem, and then apply various
solutions. Inasmuch as we've won in Iraq and Saddam and his cronies are in
the dock, now would be a good time to put some fresh minds on the problem
of how you turn DOCEX into a meaningful and effective information-age
intelligence tool.
TWS: Why haven't we heard more about this project? Aren't most of the
Iraqi documents unclassified?
Tanji: Until a flood of captured material came rushing in after the start
of Operation Enduring Freedom [in October 2001], DOCEX was a backwater:
unglamorous, not terribly career enhancing, and from what I had heard
always one step away from being mothballed.
The classification of documents obtained for exploitation varies based on
the nature of the way they were obtained and by whom. There are some
agencies that tend to classify everything regardless of how it was
acquired. I could not give you a ratio of unclassified to classified
documents.
In my opinion the silence associated with exploitation work is rooted in
the nature of the work. In addition to being tedious and time-consuming,
it is usually done after the shooting is over. We place a higher value on
intelligence information that comes to us before a conflict begins.
Confirmation that we were right (or proof that we were wrong) after the
fact is usually considered history. That some of this information may be
dated doesn't mean it isn't still valuable.
TWS: The project seems overwhelmed at the moment, with a mere 50,000
documents translated completely out of a total of 2 million. What steps,
in your view, should be taken to expedite the process?
Tanji: I couldn't say what the total take of documents or other forms of
media is, though numbers in the millions are probably not far off.
In a sense the exploitation process is what it is; you have to put eyes on
paper (or a computer screen) to see what might be worth further translation
or deeper analysis. It is a time-consuming process that has no adequate
mechanical solution. Machine translation software is getting better, but
it cannot best a qualified human linguist, of which we have very few.
Tackling the computer media problem is a lot simpler in that computer
language (binary) is universal, so searching for key words, phrases, and
the names of significant personalities is fairly simple. Built to deal
with large-scale data sets, a forensic computer system can rapidly
separate wheat from chaff. The current drawback is that the computer
forensics field is dominated by a law-enforcement mindset, which means the
approach to the digital media problem is still very linear. As most of this
material has come to us without any context ("hard drives found in Iraq"
was a common label attached to captured media) that approach means our
great-grandchildren will still be dealing with this problem.
Dealing with the material as the large and nebulous data set that it is
and applying a contextual appliqué after exploitation--in essence,
recreating the Iraqi networks as they were before Operation Iraqi Freedom
began--would allow us to get at the most significant data rapidly for
technical analysis, and allow for a political analysis to follow in short
order. If I were looking for both a quick and powerful fix I'd get various
Department of Energy labs involved; they're used to dealing with large data
sets and have done great work in the data mining and rendering fields.
TWS: To read some of the reporting on Iraq, one might come away with the
impression that Saddam Hussein was something of a benign (if not exactly
benevolent) dictator who had no weapons of mass destruction and no
connections to terrorism. Does the material you've seen support this
conventional wisdom?
Tanji: I am subject to a nondisclosure agreement, so I would rather not
get into details. I will say that the intelligence community has scraped
the surface of much of what has been captured in Iraq and in my view a
great deal more deep digging is required. Critics of the war often
complain about the lack of "proof"--a term that I had never heard used in
the intelligence lexicon until we ousted Saddam--for going to war. There
is really only one way to obtain "proof" and that is to carry out a
thorough and detailed examination of what we've captured.
TWS: I've spoken with several officials who have seen unclassified
materials indicating the former Iraqi regime provided significant
support--including funding and training--to transregional terrorists,
including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam, Algeria's GSPC, and
the Sudanese Islamic Army. Did you see any of this?
Tanji: My obligations under a nondisclosure agreement prevent me from
getting into this kind of detail.
Other officials familiar with the captured documents were less cautious.
"As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam
Hussein's] support for transregional terrorists," says one intelligence
official.
Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that
operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence
officer says: "There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into
Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the
regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and
there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS
[Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against
the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI."
The official continued: "[Saddam] used these groups because he was
interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq.
There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there,
especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it
sanctioned? I can't tell you. I don't know whether it was run by Qusay
[Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I'm just not sure.
But to say Iraq wasn't involved in terrorism is flat wrong."
STILL, some insist on saying it. Since early November, Senator Carl Levin
has been spotted around Washington waving a brief excerpt from a February
2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of Iraq. The relevant passage
reads: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic
revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide
assistance to a group it cannot control."
Levin treats these two sentences as definitive proof that Bush
administration officials knew that Saddam's regime was unlikely to work
with Islamic fundamentalists and ignored the intelligence community's
assessment to that effect. Levin apparently finds the passage so damning
that he specifically requested that it be declassified.
I thought of Levin's two sentences last Wednesday and Thursday as I sat in
a Dallas courtroom listening to testimony in the deportation hearing of
Ahmed Mohamed Barodi, a 42-year-old Syrian-born man who's been living in
Texas for the last 15 years. I thought of Levin's sentences, for example,
when Barodi proudly proclaimed his membership in the Syrian Muslim
Brotherhood, and again when Barodi, dressed in loose-fitting blue prison
garb, told Judge J. Anthony Rogers about the 21 days he spent in February
1982 training with other members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood at a
camp in Iraq.
The account he gave in the courtroom was slightly less alarming than the
description of the camp he had provided in 1989, on his written
application for political asylum in the United States. In that document,
Barodi described the instruction he received in Iraq as "guerrilla warfare
training." And in an interview in February 2005 with Detective Scott Carr
and special agent Sam Montana, both from the federal Joint Terrorism Task
Force, Barodi said that the Iraqi regime provided training in the use of
firearms, rocket-propelled grenades, and document forgery.
Barodi comes from Hama, the town that was leveled in 1982 by the armed
forces of secular Syrian dictator Hafez Assad because it was home to
radical Islamic terrorists who had agitated against his regime. The
massacre took tens of thousands of lives, but some of the extremists got
away.
Many of the most radical Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Hama were
welcomed next door--and trained--in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Spanish
investigators believe that Ghasoub Ghalyoun, the man they have accused of
conducting surveillance for the 9/11 attacks, who also has roots in the
Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, was trained in an Iraqi terrorist camp in the
early 1980s. Ghalyoun mentions this Iraqi training in a 2001 letter to the
head of Syrian intelligence, in which he seeks reentry to Syria despite his
long affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves
Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. That he did not do it for
ideological reasons is unimportant. As Barodi noted at last week's
hearing, "He used us and we used him."
Throughout the 1980s, including the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war,
Saddam cast himself as a holy warrior in his public rhetoric to counter
the claims from Iran that he was an infidel. This posturing continued
during and after the first Gulf war in 1990-91. Saddam famously ordered
"Allahu Akbar" (God is Great) added to the Iraqi flag. Internally, he
launched "The Faith Campaign," which according to leading Saddam Hussein
scholar Amatzia Baram included the imposition of sharia (Islamic law).
According to Baram, "The Iraqi president initiated laws forbidding the
public consumption of alcohol and introduced enhanced compulsory study of
the Koran at all educational levels, including Baath Party branches."
Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995,
explained these changes in an interview with Rolf Ekeus, then head of the
U.N. weapons inspection program. "The government of Iraq is instigating
fundamentalism in the country," he said, adding, "Every party member has
to pass a religious exam. They even stopped party meetings for prayers."
And throughout the decade, the Iraqi regime sponsored "Popular Islamic
Conferences" at the al Rashid Hotel that drew the most radical Islamists
from throughout the region to Baghdad. Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, who
covered one of those meetings in 1993, would later write: "Islamic
radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on
Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American
aggression." One speaker praised "the mujahed Saddam Hussein, who is
leading this nation against the nonbelievers." Another speaker said,
"Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state."
Dickey continued:
Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the
capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a "secular Baathist
ideologue" who has nothing do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to
jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they're talking about.
If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure
was Saddam's version of it.
In the face of such evidence, Carl Levin and other critics of the Iraq war
trumpet deeply flawed four-year-old DIA analyses. Shouldn't the senator
instead use his influence to push for the release of Iraqi documents that
will help establish what, exactly, the Iraqi regime was doing in the years
before the U.S. invasion?
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
|
Linear Mode
