Page 16 News, 1/16/06

I'm thinking of starting a series of news articles that although they are great stories, either about Progress in Iraq (as opposed to defeatist articles), good news about the economy, or just other good things, that due to media biased would end up on say page 16 of the New York Times.

So for GOP and College's first issue of Page 16 News, we have one story from the Weekly Standard, brought to us in part by the good man at GOP and Me (Formerly My Thoughts...)

"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."

Also, CENTCOM reports that there are now over 223,000 trained Iraqi Security Force members. This is up 77% from at the beginning of 2005, when there were 127,000. There are now 120 battalions, and 40 of them are "in the lead in defending Iraq."