Stephen Hayes continues his signal work on behalf of Americans, pressing a recalcitrant government to fully disclose the millions of documents uncovered in Iraq that paint quite a different picture of the Saddam regime than the media has reported. Finally able to gain access to the data but not the documents, Hayes writes in this week's Weekly Standard that the US has plenty of evidence that Saddam had deep connections with terrorists -- having trained thousands of them himself:

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.

Even now, Hayes tells us, only 2.5% of these documents have been translated, and even those rarely get used to investigate anything but the failure to find WMD. Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has expressed frustration that the only response he gets when he demands to know the status of expoiting these documents is "we're getting around to it". Yesterday, he got an additional response from John Negroponte, the new Intelligence czar -- it's at the top of Negroponte's list. And that check? Yeah, it's in the mail, Pete.

Read the whole essay by the indispensable Hayes, and then be sure to press your Congressmen and Senators to put pressure on the supposedly-now-nimble intelligence services to get their resources in gear now.

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