Stephen Hayes and the HARMONY documents

The indefatigable Stephen Hayes has latched onto the Iraqi regime's captured documents like a pit-bull on filet mignon. The documents number in the millions and -- a couple of years after their capture -- only 50,000 have been translated. Most are unclassified. Hayes has been pursuing their release for months.

Those that have been disclosed point to stunning revelations regarding pre-9/11 cooperation between Hussein and Al Qaeda. And, as you might expect, the mainstream media couldn't. care. less.

The former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials. The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000... ...It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals... ...Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: "There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection..."

Drink deeply from the chalice of wisdom and read the whole thing.