network was exposed last week. Now, a link to terrorism has finally been unearthed.
While the world remains fixated on the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the other evils of his regime are being systematically exposed – for the few who are still interested in them.
But the documents revealing he passed £40 million of oil vouchers to Palestinian terrorists show that, in the war on terror, Saddam was a legitimate target. His was one of the few regimes that gave insurgents the financial oxygen needed to survive.
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) has used many names, but is still little heard-of. Its most infamous atrocity was the “black September” attacks in 1970, when members hijacked four aircraft bound for New York.
It is committed to extinguishing Israel, and its commitment to violence has meant it standing defiantly aside from the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) – whom it believes sold out to the cause by agreeing to the Middle East peace process.
Officially listed as a terrorist organisation by British and American governments, it is exactly the kind of organisation which Saddam Hussein was long accused of supporting. But no-one was able to prove it until the documents of his dictatorship started to be unearthed.
The 2,300-member Iraq Survey Group has produced a report which confirms many of the worst fears of pre-war Iraq. While it did not find any WMD, it says insurgency left its search even more restricted than that of the United Nations inspectors who operated under Saddam.
So it has instead built a paper-chase – piecing together fragments of the dictatorship which show how Saddam worked out that the United Nations system was easily corrupted and would allow him to issue oil vouchers, in secret, to bribe his new friends.
The UN’s oil-for-food programme was protecting him from the United States threat while helping him to bribe aides of Jacques Chirac, the French president, and the office of Vladimir Putin, then the Russian prime minister.
But to extend this to the PFLP was extraordinarily brazen. He was daring to bankroll international terrorists – with sums of money which could keep the cells financed for years.
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