Here's another reason on why it was right to get rid of Saddam. The Weekly Standard has an article on Saddam's support of international terrorism. Of course, one knows that Palestinian terrorism has been an important beneficiary of Saddam's money. As usual, the Palestinians thanked and have always been great supporters of the Iraqi dictator. But there's more. Naturally, Saddam did not invite Osama to spend a few days on his ranch. Iraq seems however to have trained members of some of the most extremist terrorist gangs like the Algerian GSPC. As Ludovic points out, terrorist Al-Zarqawi has been in Iraq already before the invasion of 2003; this is hardly a coincidence. 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 discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.
It is quite surprising to see that the MSM do not report this kind of sensational findings. It needs a conservative newspaper like the Weekly Standard to tell you about this (The MSM would of course speak of radicals, militants or insurgents). They seem to prefer to keep silence on those findings that would put an additional question mark behind their almost religious rejection of the war. This is manipulation of the public as well. As Ludovic states though, it is striking that the Bush administration doesn't emphasize this more. | 
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