THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR HAS BEEN SIFTING THROUGH SADDAM’S FILES. Unlike The Telegraph, the Monitor hasn’t found evidence of Western corruption. But it has found evidence of Saddam’s Stalinist-style horrors — and more signs of an Al Qaeda link:

Abu Sakkar breaks down in tears at night just thinking about the murder of his fellow Shiites, which he sometimes assisted and sometimes tried – in his own way – to prevent. Rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, estimate that 200,000 to 300,000 Shiites were assassinated in the past two decades by Mr. Hussein’s government, which used a network of militias, secret police, and military security forces to create a pervasive police state in Iraq. . . .

“We were trained to ambush and kill American forces in Baghdad,” he says. “The government wanted unmarried people like myself, and we were chosen by Abbas al-Dulami, the police chief. They told us not to talk about the course with anyone. When the war started, we were taken to the camps with these Arab fighters, but they had been told not to talk to us. Some of them were being trained for operations outside Iraq.”

The young officer, curious as to whom he had been sent to work with, asked a more senior Iraqi intelligence officer present at the time, who the strangers were. He was told that they were members of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization, he says, though his report could not be confirmed.

Fascinating.