The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes on the Victoria Taft Show Monday.
ALSO: BASEBALL IN PORTLAND? Are you willing to help pay for a ballpark? Heck, no! I LOVE baseball but the way this city spends money like a crack addled shopper in a head shop is beyond reasonable. It’s time to tell baseball suitors who are in town today: Come to Portland—and Bring Money!
ALSO: THE ALITO HEARINGS: Why does the left insist Alito be a ‘swing’ vote? I want somebody who knows what on earth he/she believes the constitution says and not someone who can be counted on to be wishy washy ala SDO’C. Fuggedaboudit. Here’s a fun little parody you can send to your friends. May take a minute to load. Carol Platt Liebau on the show tonight.
PRE-WAR INTELLIGENCE
No link between Iraq and Al Qaeda again? Wouldn’t work together because Saddam was a secularist? You haven’t been paying attention. Understandable if you’re reading the NYT. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard puts the pieces together. AGAIN. With yet MORE documents from Iraq.
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.
Read the rest here.