The Democrats are walking into a political trap. They are saying the march into Iraq was based on flawed and faked intelligence. At the same time, a very powerful movie about America’s first heroes in the Global War On Terror is premiering in time for the nation to reflect on where we have come in the five years since 9-11.

And part of that reflection will be on information gathered in Iraq but just now being pulled to together to build a detailed mosaic of what Iraq was like under Saddam Hussein. When I first heard that these documents were being released I wrote: “Unleash the Blogosphere!“. Even at this early stage, the results are stunning.

The biggest item to come through was Saddam’s ties and support to terrorists. While his WMD stockpiles where the focus of a myopic western media, WMD know-how was what would be transfered to terrorists if we let the associations between the two go on too long. The next 9-11 would not have Saddam’s fingerprints on it (he was too smart for that), it would simply have the knowledge of his scientists and engineers invisibly embedded in it.

That to me was the greates threat, a threat now proved realistic and believable. Laurie Mylroie joins Stephen Hayes and exposes the truth about Saddam’s Arab Fedayeen – his foreign terrorist fighters he was training along side his Saddam Fedayeen. (note: Fedayeen means one who is willing to sacrifice – so some where willing to sacrifice for Saddam, others for Arab Muslims and not Saddam):

This document also deals with training and calls for “preparing theoretical and practical lessons on popular [shaabi, literally, ‘of the people’] bombs.” Presumably, these IEDs were designed to be relatively easy to use. And it proposes “training Arab Fedayeen as part of the plan for 2000” (“Saddam’s Fedayeen” are Iraqis; the “Arab Fedayeen” come from other countries.)

This document is consistent with Stephen Hayes’ report that other documents (which have not yet been released) reveal that in 1998, Iraq began training 2,000 Arab Islamic terrorists a year and that this training continued through 2002. It is also consistent with what U.S. forces found at Salman Pak, a site used for such training, when they captured the area. As Centcom spokesman General Vincent Brooks stated on April 6, 2003

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As a U.S. intelligence official explained to this author, the United States has interrogated the Iraqis who trained the foreign terrorists and has their accounts of that training, along with material like group pictures of the graduating classes.

Wow, group pictures. When it becomes clear Saddam was training 8,000 new 9-11 terrorists it will sink in that we faced a serious threat from the joint activities of Saddam and the Arab Fedayeen. 8,0000 terrorists – hopefully fighting, dying and dead in Iraq now – is an unnerving number when we think about what the small group of 9-11 terrorists did to us.

How many hundreds of Flight 93’s did that force represent? How many times would Americans had to fight and die inside our borders to protect the nation – sometimes armed with nothing but determination? The War in Iraq is over – the repurcussions are just now beginning to echo out into history.