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 Bush Understated the
Threat
The President didn’t lie…
[Gordon Cucullu] 1/13/06
Steven
Hayes’ must-read
article on links between Saddam Hussein’s regime and
al Qaeda and other terrorist groups is stunning reading. Check
out his article in The
Weekly Standard. Hayes discusses initial information
released from a trove of documents captured by American and
Coalition forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is not
a footlocker full but a collection larger than many public
libraries: a staggering two million items. Generally referred
to as “documents” by the media, Hayes notes that
many of these items are floppy discs, CDs, hard drives, and
other “exploitable items” in Pentagonese, each
of which may, in itself, contain hundreds or even thousands
of documents. That means that the two million number may be
double or more. It is an amazing repository of intelligence
information on a rogue regime. And we are only getting the
teasers.
One of the
oddities of history is how dictators like to document their
atrocities. Hitler’s Nazi bureaucrats were compulsive
memo writers and paper savers. Saddam, an admirer of the Fuehrer
in so many ways, seems to have emulated him in this manner
also. While we know lots of material was destroyed either by
retreating Baathists or as collateral war damage, the amount
surviving is staggering. And that is the problem. There is
too much of a good thing.
Contributor
Gordon Cucullu
Former
Green Beret lieutenant colonel, Gordon Cucullu is now
an editorialist, author and a popular speaker. Born
into a military family, he lived and served for more
than thirteen years in East Asia, including eight years
in Korea. For his Special Forces service in Vietnam
he was awarded a Bronze Star, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry,
and the Presidential Unit Commendation. After separation
from the Army, he worked on Korea and East Asian affairs
at both the Pentagon and Department of State as well
as an executive for General Electric in Korea. His
first major non-fiction work, Separated
at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin,
is based in large part on his extensive experience
in Korea and East Asia as a governmental insider and
businessman. [website]
[go to Cucullu index]
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Because of
the Democrat accusation avalanche - “Bush lied about
WMD” - refrain that became the basis for the 2004 presidential
campaign, the focus of the enormous translation burden to date
has been on WMD-related material. Finding out what we can about
Saddam’s WMD is a logical mission for many other reasons
too. Much has emerged. But other regime actions have taken
second priority, and this needs to be corrected. Another leftist
slur is that “there are no links between Saddam and al
Qaeda or other terrorists.” Hayes is a pioneer in his
book The Connection in showing how strong ties in
fact existed.
Now the depth
and intricacy of the Iraqi-terrorist connections are being
revealed by Saddam’s own documents. As Hayes makes the
point, inside these documents are the names and backgrounds
of 8,000 or more terrorists who trained in Iraq from 1999-2002. Eight
thousand terrorists trained in Iraq under Saddam! And
anti-war media along with apologists for Saddam still blindly
insist that Saddam had not ties to al Qaeda and to terrorist
organizations. Such willful denial in the face of this evidence
is delusional.
Even more
compelling at the moment than accessing the WMD material, is
deciphering the list of names of the terrorists and their cell
leaders. Considering that post-Operation Iraqi Freedom many
of these thugs have been drawn back to the fight in Iraq like
loathsome moths to the flame, it would assist both new Iraqi
government and American military to have these names and the
personal data accompanying them. Hayes quotes one official
as saying “We had box loads of Iraqi Intelligence records
- their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information.
In an insurgency, wouldn't that have been helpful?”
Of the millions
of documents to date only 50,000 have been translated. This
is less than 2%, and look what has already emerged. The glacial
speed of translation is stark testimony to the paucity of proper
translators in the intelligence business. Nor has sufficiently
high priority been assigned to the project. Of the few translated
documents, only a few have been released to the public. That
judgment error may be rectified. After years of being pilloried
unjustifiably by their enemies, the administration is pressing
intelligence agencies hard to release these documents.
This is an
essential point: if the documents are genuine and the translations
accurate then it is essential for the American public to know
the facts. It is critically important that the administration
reveal that its decision to liberate Iraq was correct and that
the links to terror organizations did exist. If the Bush people
fail to do this – and to do it aggressively – then
one must question the legitimacy of the documents. After all,
how could they hesitate to proffer information vindicating
them after years of leftist abuse?
Part of the
holdup is the intelligence community’s obsession with
security, classification, and compartmentation of information.
In the film Pritzi’s Honor, the line “Sicilians
love money more than their kids; and they really love their
kids,” could be flipped to most intelligence types. They
really love classification and secrecy: institutionally, if
not personally, more than their kids. As a reciprocal, the
community hates declassification passionately. The fear, approaching
paranoia, is that something will be released that will inadvertently
or unexpectedly return to haunt the releaser.
Since even
paranoid people are occasionally being followed, it is wise
to approach declassification and public release of intelligence
quality documents in a measured, reserved fashion. In this
case, it appears that on balance, more rather than less could
be reasonably made available to the public without collapsing
our effort to wipe out terrorists. Having endured years of
constant carping about “no ties between Saddam and terrorists” it
would be worth slipping a few secrets just to set the record
straight. And at the rate that the New York Times and Washington
Post are divulging highly classified information it would take
a real bombshell in these documents to outdo their efforts.
There is
another, less defensible motive in keeping these documents
hidden. Those on the inside who wish to embarrass or debunk
the administration, those who leaked NSA secrets and CIA secrets,
do not want Americans to learn the truth. They want the overwhelming
evidence of Baathist ties to Islamofascist terrorists kept
quiet. First, it helps the president to know these facts, and
second it harms their credibility. Among these are the self-promoting
analysts who assured the world that “secular” regimes
like Saddam’s could not ally with hard-religious groups
like al Qaeda.
They conveniently
imposed their own values on the situation and ignored the long
standing Middle Eastern proverb that “the enemy of my
enemy is my friend.” It was relatively easy for Iraqi
intelligence units to establish close working ties with bin
Laden, Algerian, Sudanese, and other Islamic terror groups.
They trained at Salman Pak and Ansar-al-Islam camps inside
Iraq and received funding, forged documents, training, and
equipping by Iraqi intelligence. Given the amorphous nature
of the Islamofascist movement and the peripatetic character
of the individual terrorists, most of the 8,000 plus terrorists
passing through places like Ansar al-Islam and Salman Pak camps
could be called al Qaeda related.
What other
intelligence gems ought we expect to read in these papers?
We have strong suspicions that the long-standing but CIA-discredited
Czech Republic report of Mohammad Atta, World Trade Center
homicide pilot, receiving money in August 2001 in Prague from
an Iraqi intelligence agent may in fact be verified in these
documents. That would establish a direct link between 911 and
Saddam.
A huge benefit
from release of these papers would be to set the record straight
with ordinary concerned Americans. We have been force fed the “Bush
lied” line so much that many people reflexively accept
it. For anyone other than the most rabid anti-Bush haters,
release of these documents will instill confidence in the war
and the justification that America had in liberating Iraq.
Precisely for this reason expect the Democrats to try to interfere
with release and the MSM to cherry-pick its way through the
documents, practicing the art of selective reporting that they
have perfected over recent years. -one-
Curious
about North Korea? Learn more in Gordon’s
best-selling book Separated
at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin became
the Evil Twin, Lyons Press available at bookstores now.
copyright
2006 Gordon Cucullu
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