About a dozen of them, here in the US for training. Two ways to look at this. They’re basically good guys who just don’t want to go back to Iraq, to their families and to the country that we’re hoping they help us put back together. Or they’re basically bad guys who are and have always been up to no good, and have fooled our system to the extent that they got here to get trained, and then went on the lam.

So, basically, either way you look at it, it’s not the best of news.

Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, say nearly a dozen Iraqis fled military training facilities in the U.S., including a brigadier general who went to Canada with his family earlier this year.

Army officials yesterday confirmed that five Iraqi military personnel whom the Army had been training disappeared between 2005 and 2007. They did not know how many other Iraqis sponsored by the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy may have done the same.

“Nothing that this command is aware of would suggest that any of those students who departed from their training or returned back to Iraq pose any threat to the United States,” said Harvey Perritt, civilian spokesman for U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which oversees all the schools the Army has in the continental U.S.