Documents Reveal Saddam's Hidden Agenda

By Erick Stakelbeck
Washington Terror Analyst

CBN.com – WASHINGTON - Earlier this month, the Bush administration began releasing some of the two million classified documents captured by U.S. forces in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan.

Considering what they have already revealed, it has left many wondering why it took so long to open them up.

Over the past three years, these have become rallying cries for many critics of the Iraq war: no WMD. No connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Bush lied the U.S. into war.

But critics soon may need to re-think their barbs, thanks to the release of Saddam's secret documents.

Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra (R-MI) is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He remarked, "There are still a lot of key individuals who have never been interviewed, there's been a lot of sites that have never been investigated, and there have been lots of documents that have never been translated.”

He led the fight on Capitol Hill to have the documents released to the public.

“We know that Saddam had a systemic approach in place to destroy a lot of the documents. These are the things that he missed,” Hoekstra said.

The documents have already provided a clearer picture of Saddam's links to international terror.
One shows that in 1999, Saddam's son Uday called for a wave of suicide attacks against Western targets.

Another document states that in 1995, a representative of Saddam's regime met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan with Saddam's full approval.

During the meeting, bin Laden suggested that Iraq and al-Qaeda should carry out "joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. Eight months after this meeting, terrorists killed five u.s. military advisors in Riyadh. The terrorists claimed they had been trained by bin Laden.

Steven Hayes is a senior writer for The Weekly Standard . “You hear a lot now in the mainstream press and primarily Democratic politicians like Carl Levin and others, that there was no relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda,” Hayes said, “…The Iraqis who are responsible for conducting the relationship--and their own documents--tell quite a different story.”

His book, The Connection , details Saddam's links to al-Qaeda. Hayes says Saddam's documents show that Iraq funded Abu Sayyaf--an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group based in the Philippines. But that is not all.

Hayes said, “One of the documents describes the things that Iraqis--Iraqi intelligence officials, Iraqi regime officials--should do to stoke an insurgency. And they said things like kill Sunni clerics and blame the Shiites, kill Shiite clerics and blame the Sunnis. Use mosques to store arms.”

Could the newly released documents also shed light on Iraq's elusive wmds? Jack Shaw--a former top Pentagon official--said recently that Russia helped move Iraq's wmds into Syria and Lebanon prior to the u.s. invasion. Others believe that wmds are still in Iraq today.

David Gaubatz is a former U.S. federal agent who recently met with officials on Capitol Hill.

“I'm 100 percent confident that WMD was and still is in Iraq,” affirmed Gaubatz. “The only thing I think, with the documents -- [they're] going to verify what I'm saying.”

In 2003, Gaubatz was assigned to Iraq for four months. His main task was to find weapons of mass destruction. He told us of sites he personally visited in the city of Nassariya in southern Iraq, where he believes Saddam's regime hid WMD.

"One is very close, Gaubatz remarked, “…within a couple of kilometers of the "Saddam Hospital"--that's what they called it at the time…They were sealing them up into the pipes. The primary stockpiles were [in] areas where you had the waterways. What they'd have to do, initially, was to drain the water in the areas. And then they would build the bunkers underneath. And then, put the water back over the bunkers, and no one from the outside could ever tell."

A number of reliable Iraqi sources led him to the sites. Gaubatz says that "ex-security officials in the area who were at the sites--police officers, military personnel, and just regular people in the city--they knew what was going on…And the people who were giving us that info, they were putting their life on the line, many times."

Gaubatz says that he passed this information along to his superiors, but no one ever came to check it out.

“They sent me there to find this stuff,” Gaubatz declared. “I located it--with not just one source, but with various credible sources---and then we're sitting back saying, ‘Well, when are you gonna come? When are you gonna come and exploit the site, and search the site?'“

Hoekstra says that he ran up against similar roadblocks in his push to have Saddam's documents released. Before changing course earlier this month, John Negroponte--the director of National Intelligence--had refused to release them. But why?

According to Hoekstra, “What we have here is, we've got a relationship or a recognition that some of the documents may embarrass some of our allies, because it will highlight the relationships that some of these governments or some of the people from these countries had with Iraq or had with Saddam Hussein.”

Just last week, the Pentagon released a report saying that two of the documents show that Russia passed along confidential details about the u.s. war plan to Saddam--and that Russia's ambassador to Iraq gave Saddam information on u.s. troop movements. Russia denies these charges.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she will discuss the documents with Russian officials. But with more and more of them becoming available, it may not be her last awkward conversation with a so-called ally.