The Billiken's Bluff

For quite some time, the Billiken community has been concerned with the question of how history might judge the decision to invade Iraq and overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein. Even given the glaring absence of discovered WMDs, history is going to take her sweet-ass time making up her mind on the issue.

But for those Billiken readers who remain interested in evaluating the threat posed by the late Iraqi regime and the nature of its support for terrorism should at the very least take a gander at what among the vast collection of documents recovered in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq is slowly being now released to the American public. On March 16, to begin with, the U.S. government posted on the web 9 documents captured in Iraq, as well as 28 al Qaeda documents that had been released in February.

For those who don't have any interest in poking around government web sites looking at documents themselves, at least check out the double-length Foreign Affairs article that came out this week, which details (among other terror connections) how Saddam Hussein's regime povided support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s (based on a review of 700 Iraqi documents by analysts with the Institute for Defense Analysis and the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.).

It's a really good article.

Here's a taste, from page 6:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

Plans for the release of many more documents have been announced.

No word yet from Michael Moore or the rap community on where all that oil we fought the war over is being stored away.