The elephant in the room

President Bush ought to give journalist Stephen Hayes a Medal of Freedom, because Hayes has done more than just about any other private citizen to make the case for why removing Saddam Hussein from power was necessary. Hayes has certainly done a better job than the Bush Administration in documenting and publicizing the connections between Hussein's regime and terrorism, and with Al Qaeda as well.

As I wrote about here, lately Hayes has been trying to obtain documents from a vast cache of documents retrieved by the US in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, and now in the control of the Pentagon. The great majority of these documents remain untranslated. Even the very titles of some of these documents hint at undeniable connections between Hussein, terrorism and even Al Qaeda.

Now, in an article for The Weekly Standard entitled Saddam's Terror Training Camps, Hayes delivers some bombshell news based on documents from this treasure trove of information.

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.

Certainly the blogs are discussing this, but there's one thing that some may miss, and that's this.

If this is true, that Hussein trained thousands of terrorists inside Iraq, in the four years preceding the invasion, it is yet another sign of our colossal intelligence failures inside Iraq.

How could we miss those kinds of numbers training inside Iraq? How could we miss that number of people moving about the region, coming to Iraq for training?

We still maintained the no fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. It's not like we were nowhere near the region. Certainly we must have had high quality satellite coverage of central Iraq. How could we miss the signs of these camps?

To be sure, there had been public mention in the past of at least the training camp at Salman Pak, and the infamous airline fuselage. (Funny, the Left doesn't usually bring that one up in trumpeting Hussein as no terrorist threat.)

Combined with the well-documented failures concerning what was, or wasn't found with Iraq's WMD programs after the invasion, it makes you wonder what our intelligence agencies knew about Iraq at all. And if you really want to start spitting nails, let's throw the whole Able Danger fiasco into the mix.

And yet, former CIA director George Tenet was given the Medal of Freedom. Who knows what he would've got if he had discovered this large scale training going on in Iraq.

In his Jan 8 column at the Chicago Sun-Times, Mark Steyn talks about the shortcomings of our intelligence capabilities. He starts out this way:

Here's a Reuters headline from New Year's Day: "CIA May Need Decade To Rebuild Clandestine Service."

A decade, huh? Circa 2016, you mean? The last time I checked the job-completion estimates was back in spring 2004, when the agency's then-director, George Tenet, told the 9/11 Commission that it would take another half-decade to rebuild the clandestine service. In other words, three years after 9/11, he was saying he needed another five years. As I wrote at the time, "Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt had turned to Tenet to start up the OSS, the CIA's Second World War predecessor. In 1942, he'd have told the president not to worry, he'd have it up and running by 1950."

But CIA reform is like the budget for Boston's Big Dig or the 2012 London Olympics. Think of a number, triple it and update your excuses. Four years after 9/11, it may take 10 years to rebuild the clandestine service. So Tenet would be telling FDR not to worry, we'll have the World War II intelligence operation up and running in time for the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. OK, make that the Cuban missile crisis. But definitely by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The latest estimate came from Gary Berntsen, who was the CIA's man on the ground during the hunt for bin Laden in Tora Bora in late 2001. That's what most folks think the agency does, just as "clandestine service" is assumed to be the core activity -- all the super top-secret undercover stuff you see whenever the CIA turns up in movies like Syriana, in which the sinister spooks subvert a Middle Eastern government. Oh, if only. Away from the glamorous adventuring of the silver screen, alas, the only government they're any good at subverting is the United States'.

(Short plug: The Reuters article about Gary Berntsen was included in an item in our Jan 2 Winds of War Briefing. It's the last item in the briefing. If you keep up on the Briefings, you knew about this long before the great Mark Steyn wrote about it!)

In all the leaks about secret surveillance programs, the CIA has shown itself not only to be inept, but downright antagonistic to Bush's policies. Maybe we could overlook their hostility if they were bringing in gold mines of intelligence, but when an agency with the word Intelligence in its name can't perform when we most need it, a change is in order.

It may be a Herculean task, but Porter Goss needs to muck out all the stables in the CIA and bring in some fresh horses. For its part, the Pentagon needs to make translating these documents a top priority. Our national security is at stake.