On April 6th I posted about one of the Saddam documents that was written by a officer in the Iraqi military asking for volunteers amongst the ranks to do suicide missions against Americans.

Most of the left dismissed the translation done by a poster at Free Republic stating that since the site is mostly visited by the right that it wasn’t a unbiased translation. Now Ed Morrissey has paid for two separate translators to translate the document and guess what he found:

When I posted this document, readers of this blog questioned the accuracy of the translation. People know that Joseph translated this for Free Republic, a strongly pro-war website, and that it was distributed by Laurie Mylroie, another pro-war commentator.

[...]In order to solve this problem, I decided to hire two Arabic translators on my own.

I found a translation service, Language 123, that employs a number of translators who work as free agents. The first translator, Nabil Bouitieh, works in the UK as a full-time translator for several government services. He has language certificates from Karl Marx University in Dresden, the German Cultural Center in Damascus, a degree in translation from Polytechnic of Central London, and a Masters of Diplomatic Studies from the Diplomatic Academy of London. Separately, I also hired Hamania H, who works from Damascus. She earned several degrees in language at Saint Joseph University in Beirut, including masters in translation, foreign languages, and bachelors in both areas and in law as well.

Neither of them knew that I had asked the other to translate the document. I split out page 6 from the original PDF and sent it to both along with payment. They both returned their translations today, and their results make it clear that Joseph Shahda had it right all along.

The document is authentic period. It proves that the Saddam regime actively recruited people from their own military to attack Americans.

Would you call this a smoking gun?

I do.

UPDATE

Ed Morrissey writes this morning about how significant this memo is.? This memo was written by a Iraqi Air Force General asking for volunteers to commit suicide bombings.? What kind of suicide bombing can a pilot do?

This memo is dated March 17, 2001, less than six months prior to the coordinated al-Qaeda attack on the US, at a time when the AQ plotters and pilots appeared to be in close proximity to Iraqi intelligence agents in Europe.

In a series of posts I wrote last year, I pointed out activity in Germany by the Iraqi Intelligence Service that the 9/11 Commission missed. Specifically, the Germans arrested two IIS agents in late February for their operation of an espionage ring in their country. Their intelligence estimate in 2002 would later claim that Iraq had reached out to extremists Islamist groups to coordinate attacks on American interests. In the winter of 2001, however, those agents had operated in Germany at the same time as Mohammed Atta met Ramzi Binalshibh in Berlin, the same time that German counterintelligence picked up the trail of the Iraqi spies.[...]

Most of the left will say that Atta never left our shores because his cell phone was used a few times during that time period.? I mean there is no way a sleeper cell of terrorists would use counter surveillence techniques to fool anyone right?? Ed writes about why the Commission rejected this Atta travel timeline:

The Commission primarily relied on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for this rejection. However, as I pointed out then, the Commission also acknowledged that KSM had lied about other operational aspects of the 9/11 plot in what seemed to them to be a campaign of misinformation. Further, had Iraq wanted to meet Atta, they hardly would have had him travel under his own name to the Czech Republic; they would be careful to keep themselves disconnected from the 9/11 plot as much as possible.

And then Ed gets into the meat of this memo:

Originally I wrote that Atta may have desired Iraqi support for getting the muscle hijackers into the US and traveled to Prague to secure that assistance. However, this recruitment memo offers another tantalizing possibility. The one 9/11 pilot who had not traveled outside the US the previous January was Hani Hanjour, who had just begun his flight training, which reportedly had not gone well. (See pages 226-227 of the 9/11 Commission report.) Hanjour had been assigned the most difficult of the 9/11 targets — the Pentagon. That flight required taking the plane over the Beltway and into an incredibly low but stable approach to maximize the damage done to the building. This took more skill than merely flying a plane into the Twin Towers, and the late start on training could not have helped in Hanjour’s preparations. Unlike Atta and Shehhi, the report never mentions Hanjour getting any training in a large-craft simulator.

The trip to Germany in January by the other pilots may have been an attempt to gather better-trained pilots for the attack — and remember that the original plan was to have two waves of attacks, at least according to KSM, the second of which got cancelled due to increased security after 9/11. The late start for Hanjour would have endangered their mission. We know that the Iraqis started recruiting from their Air Force, and that those pilots had nothing to fly at the time. The trip to Prague may have been to find out if the Iraqis had anyone who could assist Hanjour in the difficult task ahead of him, or to plan the second wave of attacks using skilled pilots rather than the amateurs from the Hamburg cell.

I’m telling ya, this is a huge smoking gun.