Seeker Blog

We get too little real journalism about these subjects and too much “churnalism”, in which a single sometimes misleading wire report is repeated by thousands of commentators while nobody bothers to read the source document.

The Federation of American Scientists has made available the just-released report by the Iraqi Perspectives Project, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents. The report comprises five volumes, totaling some 200MB of PDF downloads. It is a formidable document to digest. Predictably no big media analysis has emerged so far — based on actually reading the report.

That said, reliable source Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian, has had a go, resulting in the best analysis I’ve come across so far. Best to read the entire article, half being devoted to an interview with visiting Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog. Here’s just the last paragraphs on the captured documents report:

…the new report details a dizzying promiscuity in Saddam’s terrorist operations and support for terrorists in many parts of the world. Saddam tried to kill the wife of French president Francois Mitterrand. He targeted Western journalists directly.

One of the most wry and unconsciously amusing exchanges involves a complaint by Iraqi embassies that they cannot dispose of the vast quantities of weapons and explosives that they have transported in part by diplomatic pouch and accumulated across the globe. There are Iraqi terrorist training schools with dozens of non-Iraqi Arabs. There is support for Pakistani terror groups. An agent is sent to the Philippines to look for opportunities. There is a close relationship with Hamas, which boasts of its armed cells in France, Sweden and Denmark. There is a call for Iraqi authorities to find recruits willing to undertake suicide missions. There is the desire to kill Americans in different parts of the world. And all this comes from translated official Iraqi government documents.

The Bush administration, and its coalition allies in Britain and Australia, never, ever claimed that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.

They said something else entirely. The then US deputy secretary of state, Rich Armitage, said to me at the time of the Iraq invasion that Saddam’s connections with terrorists was “at the top of our concerns”.

That was just exactly where they should have been

The Iraqi Perspectives Project was originally referred to as “The Harmony Database” [which I first wrote about here in 2006]. It has taken three years to assemble some preliminary conclusions — I understand largely due to the severe shortage of Arabic linguists. A glimpse of the value of the work can be gleaned from the table of contents:

Executive Summary ES-l

Terror as an Instrument of State Power 1
Infrastructure for State Terrorism l
State Sponsorship of Suicide Operations 7

State Relationships with Terrorist Groups 13
Managing Relationships 13
Nurturing Organizational Relationships 15
Outreach Program 20
“Quid Pro Quo” 24

Iraq and Terrorism: Three Cases 27
The Abu aI-Abbas Case 27
Attacks on Humanitarian Organizations 30
Destabilizing Saudi Arabia and Kuwait 35

The Business of Terror 41
Venture Capitalists for Terrorists .41
The Terror “Business” Model of Saddam Hussein 42

Conclusion

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