As part of our Guest Essay series, I asked Joseph Shahda to write for us on the topic of translating Sadaam Hussien's captured documents.
Mr. Shahda, who goes by the screen name "jveritas" on FreeRepublic.com, has had a article written about him in the Boston Globe:
( http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/03/18/us_puts_iraqi_documents_on_the_web/ )
"Joseph Shahda earns his living as an engineer. But in his spare time, he's an intelligence agent, working to ferret out the truth about the regime of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
When the US government on Thursday began publishing captured Iraqi government documents on the Internet, Shahda eagerly began to translate the files into English and publish them on a conservative website.
''I feel a sense of duty," said Shahda, a native of Lebanon who supports President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. ''I think it's a duty for people who know Arabic to translate the documents."
Without further ado, here is the "jveritas" essay for Heart of America:
“Since March 2006 the Pentagon has released thousands of documents captured in Iraq and that belongs to different departments and apparatus in Saddam regime, like the Iraq intelligence services, the Iraqi military institutions, Saddam Presidential secretariat, etc…
Some of documents that were released so far contain some very important information about Saddam's very strong connections to terrorism, and some prove that the Saddam regime has kept secret programs related to WMD and the precursors required to make WMD.
There are ample evidences from some of the documents that Saddam's relation to terrorism was much stronger than what most analysts believed before the start of the war. For example one document talks about a meeting between the Iraqi Intelligence Service and Osama Bin Laden in 1995 under the authorization of Saddam Hussein himself.
Other documents talk about training the Arabs Fedaeyeens, who are the non-Iraqi Arab terrorists since the year 2000, training them to be suicide bombers, and an order from Saddam Hussein himself to treat these Arabs Feedayeens the same as treating the Iraqi Special Forces in salaries and preferences.
These are the same Arabs Feedayeens who constituted later on the base of the “Foreign Terrorists Insurgency” in Iraq that caused the death of thousands of innocent Iraqis. One particular document dated March 2001, talks about the Iraqi Air Force recruiting people from their own ranks to conduct “suicide missions” against Israel and US interests. Also one document shows an order from Saddam Hussein to pay $ 25,000 for the family of each Palestinian who conducts a suicide terrorist act against Israel.
On the WMD front, there are some documents that clearly show the Saddam regime's violations of the UN resolutions regarding WMD. For example one document dated September 1998 talks about “secret” research programs related to WMD and a warning from Hussam Muhamad Amin, the person in charge of the “Iraqi National Monitoring Directory (NMD)”, to be very careful that these secret research programs related to WMD will not be caught by the UN inspectors.
Ironically the NMD was set up by Saddam in coordination with the UN as a self-monitoring agency in Iraq to prevent any programs related to WMD or acquisition of WMD. Some documents talk about the production of prohibited materials that can be used as precursors to make Chemical Weapons.
Other documents talk about how the Iraqi were always hiding evidence related to WMD, one of them talks about orders to remove all the information related to WMD from computers, put the information on disks and hide it from the UN inspectors or the hiding and destruction of WMD documents and archives as late as August 2002 shortly before the UN inspectors were scheduled to come back to Iraq.
One particular document dated 2002 talks about the production of Mobile laboratories. The issue of the mobile laboratories has been highly debated since the start of the war and although the intelligence assessment tends to believe that the mobile labs were not meant as part of WMD program, there is no final conclusion on that. In fact the 2002 date of this document may contradict some of the intelligence finding that the mobile labs were part of seed purification plants and that these mobile lab productions ended in the year 1997.
Besides that are many other documents that talk about Saddam's forces doing extensive training exercises and maneuvers all the way to the year 2003 on how to deal with WMD attacks in particular Chemical attacks from countries like Iran or Israel. These documents show that the regime was very obsessed with these types of training and it is hard to imagine that such an obsession was purely for defensive purposes without the regime's capability to attack as well.
Let us not forget that Saddam's regime survived the Iran-Iraq war by hitting the Iranians very hard with Chemical weapons. An extremely paranoid regime like Saddam's knows it cannot be just on the defensive when it comes to Chemical weapons.
Unfortunately these Iraqi documents received very little coverage from the media. One reason for this is that the main stream media, who are staunch opponents of the war in Iraq and President Bush, will not be interested in showing Iraqi documents that contradict their mantra about Iraq WMD or Saddam's connections to terrorism.
The media has been telling the American public for many years now that there was no WMD in Iraq or program related to WMD, and at the same time they have greatly underestimated Saddam's relation to terrorism, or in many cases they think that Saddam had very little relation to terrorism.
In the rare occasions when the main stream media, which is largely left wing, handled the issue of the Iraqi documents in the first few weeks of its release back in March 2006, it was mostly about dismissing these documents for not containing anything of importance.
The Iraqi documents must be given more importance by the media and by the politicians because from the few thousand documents released so far, out of an estimated 2 million, there is already plenty of evidence of Saddam's strong relation to terrorism and that Saddam never fully abode by the UN resolutions regarding WMD, at least the regime intent to keep doing secret research related to WMD, or producing precursors to be used for WMD, all the while waiting for the opportune moment to go into a large scale of WMD production.
These documents prove to us that after 9/11, and our fight in this general war on terror, a regime like Saddam Hussein's could not be tolerated and thus his removal from power was a great thing for us and the world.”
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