Saturday, March 11, 2006

Unexploited smoking-gun Iraqi documents / Stephen Hayes and his followers all in a knot

The erudite folk at Powerline Blog have been pushing, for quite some time now, the work of the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes.

Among other things, Stephen is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and has authored The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.

Stephen is quite sure there is a well-documented strong connection between the Saddam Hussein's Iraq and terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda.

He goes on and on about this. One of the cornerstones of his argument is that there are millions of unexploited documents captured during the recent war. They've not been translated and there is so much, it's taking a very very long time to work through it all.

Stephen argues that buried in those millions of pages of stuff is documented proof of Saddam's connection with Terror.

The value of such proof is very high. It would go a long way to silencing critics (like me) that the Iraq adventure was / is a disaster based on an invalid set of arguments, rotten to their core.

I'm all in favor of exploiting whatever intelligence is there to exploit. If it shows these kinds of deep connections between Saddam and Terror that Stephen is so sure exists, great.

Stephen and I part companies though over the reason why the U.S. is not exploiting it. It would seem to me that Bush would just love to get his hands on real clear evidence. It would provide the attack dogs real actual ammunition to use.

Stephen seems to think that there is some kind of strange conspiracy about it. Which makes no sense. The people who are most interested in demonstrating those connections are the very same people suppressing the effort to find them?

Stephen and the powerline people are putting together some very tortured logic to explain away this contradicton. From this powerline post, Stephen describes a recent Bush meeting where this topic is discussed:

"Is this the tapes thing?" Bush asked, referring to two ABC News reports that included excerpts of recordings Saddam Hussein made of meetings with his war cabinet in the years before the U.S. invasion. Bush had not seen the newscasts but had been briefed on them.

Pence framed his response as a question, quoting Abraham Lincoln: "One of your Republican predecessors said, 'Give the people the facts and the Republic will be saved.' There are 3,000 hours of Saddam tapes and millions of pages of other documents that we captured after the war. When will the American public get to see this information?"

Bush replied that he wanted the documents released. He turned to Hadley and asked for an update. Hadley explained that John Negroponte, Bush's Director of National Intelligence, "owns the documents" and that DNI lawyers were deciding how they might be handled.

Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war."

Bush told Hadley to expedite the release of the Iraq documents. "This stuff ought to be out. Put this stuff out."

Now, it does seem very strange that Bush is represented here as having a vague understanding of some "tapes thing", but it's only weird if you want to credit him with more competence than he deserves. But, if he's competent at anything, you'd think it would be competent at organizing a data mining project that would provide the justification he lacks to date for the war.

Powerline's analysis of the above is where the real torturing comes into play:

You'd think that would be the end of the story. If I gave a similar order to my staff, it would be obeyed. Promptly. And you'd probably assume that an order from the President of the United States would be obeyed with even more alacrity.


Powerline, I completely agree with you. But here you get all crazy:

Not so. John Negroponte "owns" the millions of pages of documents and countless hours of tapes that have been captured, but not yet exploited. And Negroponte doesn't want their contents made public. So it isn't happening, no matter what President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld say.

Why would John N. turn rogue?

One of Powerline's answers:
Negroponte is concerned that making the Iraq regime's documents public will embarrass our "allies," like, for example, Russia. As Hayes points out, Iraqi documents that have recently been translated indicate that Russia was training Iraqi intelligence agents virtually up to the outbreak of the war in 2003.

We are supposed to take this seriously? Negroponte is a rogue agent who, against the orders of his Commander in Chief and against the political interests of this entire administration, prefers to shield Russia or other countries from embarrasment in favor of informing the American public?

Powerline seems to revel in this farce:
These Iraqi documents and other materials are critically important. Everyone hopes that they will reveal what happened to Saddam's WMDs, and expects them to document close relationships between Saddam and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. That is precisely why they are controversial. Burying the documents seized from Iraqi intelligence comports well with the Democrats' effort to undercut the rationales for the Iraq war. That's easy to understand; what is not so easy to understand is why President Bush can't get his own administration to make these facts public.
(emphasis added mine)

There is a much more reasonable interpretation: There is no rush to turn the documents loose because the documents don't provide evidence that Saddam was a threat to the U.S. They don't show where the WMD went because there were no WMD. The documents don't show a close relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda because there is no connection. The U.S. spent upwards of $700 million and 10's of thousands of man hours seeking out this information by travelling all around the country, interviewing people and looking at physical locations for this evidence.

In all likelihood, there is no smoking gun evidence in the documents. Powerline, Stephen and the pro-war crowd are clutching at straws.

If we want veer off the common sense track and go into conspiracy mode, I can think of one that holds a bit more water ... Negroponte is dragging his feet because the documents will embarrass the administration or those that it loves.

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