DoD’s Iraqi Perspectives Project - Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents

[nerdgirl 0]

All 5 redacted volumes of the Iraqi Perspectives Project’s “Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents” report done by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) for JFCOM are available online as of 20 March.

The DoD’s decision to not issue an official press release/statement release nor release the report online but to instead send copies of the unclassified, cleared for public release report via US mail on cd was discussed last week in the post “IRAQ - The New Vacation Hot Spot!.”

VR/Marg ... still waiting on my own cd to come through the US mail

--- ---- ----

"A Defense Department-sponsored report that examined captured Iraqi documents for indications of links between Saddam Hussein and terrorist organizations is now available online.

"The five-volume report affirmed that there was 'no "smoking gun" (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda.' But it also said there was 'strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism.'

"Although the report was publicly released on March 13, the Department of Defense declined to publish it online, offering instead to provide copies on disk.

"The Defense Intelligence Agency 'made every effort to balance national security concerns, requirements of law, and the needs of an informed democracy and focused the redactions to the necessary minimum,' the report states.

The Iraqi documents themselves are an eclectic, uneven bunch.

One of them, a fifty-page Iraqi 'intelligence' analysis, disparages the austerely conservative Wahhabi school of Islam by claiming that its eighteenth century founder, Ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab, had ancestors who were Jews.

In what must be the only laugh-out-loud line in the generally dismal five-volume report, the Iraqi analysis states that Ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab’s grandfather’s true name was not 'Sulayman' but 'Shulman.' [emphasis - nerdgirl]

"'Tawran confirms that Sulayman, the grandfather of the sheikh, is (Shulman); he is Jew from the merchants of the city of Burstah in Turkey, he had left it and settled in Damascus, grew his beard, and wore the Muslim turban, but was thrown out for being voodoo.'

"The analysis, produced by the Air Defense Security System of Iraq’s General Military Intelligence Directorate, is not a very reliable guide to Islamic or Jewish history, though it may explain something about Iraq’s air defenses.

“'The Birth of Al-Wahabi Movement and Its Historic Roots' appears in volume 5 of the Defense Department report and is also directly available in this extract'"

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[warpedskydiver 0]