One of the most dogged detractors of the increasingly “official” pre-war intel history—specifically, of the notion that Iraq had no ties to Islamic terrorism or al Qaeda (a broad assertion offered dismissively by Bush war detractors that has been debunked by, among others, the 911 Commission Report and the NYT) —is the Weekly Standards‘ Stephen Hayes, whose investigative reporting on the history of an Iraq intelligence nexus to al Qaeda has been relentless and fair-minded, though it quite obviously proceeds from a skepticism that the connection was negligible.
His latest, from the Jan 16 Weekly Standard, continues to shine a light on recovered documents that Hayes and others insist show a colabortive effort between Iraq and Muslim terrorists to train Islamic militants—suggestions that a secular Iraq and a fundamentalism Islamic ideology were at irreconcilable odds nothwithstanding (a lesson we’re learning as Assad’s Baathish Syria, Iran’s mullacracy, and Islamic jihadists continue to work together to try undermining Democratic reforms in Iraq). Here’s Hayes:
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.
The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis. According to three officials with knowledge of the intelligence on Iraqi training camps, White House and National Security Council officials were briefed on these findings in May 2005; senior Defense Department officials subsequently received the same briefing.
The photographs and documents on Iraqi training camps come from a collection of some 2 million “exploitable items” captured in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. They include handwritten notes, typed documents, audiotapes, videotapes, compact discs, floppy discs, and computer hard drives. Taken together, this collection could give U.S.
intelligence officials and policymakers an inside look at the activities of the former Iraqi regime in the months and years before the Iraq war.The discovery of the information on jihadist training camps in Iraq would seem to have two major consequences: It exposes the flawed assumptions of the experts and U.S. intelligence officials who told us for years that a secularist like Saddam Hussein would never work with Islamic radicals, any more than such jihadists would work with an infidel like the Iraqi dictator. It also reminds us that valuable information remains buried in the mountain of documents recovered in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past four years.
Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million “exploitable items” have been thoroughly examined. That’s 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the “DOCEX” project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. “At this rate,” he says, “if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff.”
Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group—who were among the first to analyze the finds—considered those items top priority. “At first, if it wasn’t WMD, it wasn’t translated. It wasn’t exploited,” says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.
“We had boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records—their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information,” says the former military intelligence officer. “In an insurgency, wouldn’t that have been helpful?”
How many of those unexploited documents might help us better understand the role of Iraq in supporting transregional terrorists? How many of those documents might provide important intelligence on the very people—Baathists, former regime officials, Saddam Fedayeen, foreign fighters trained in Iraq—that U.S. soldiers are fighting in Iraq today? Is what we don’t know literally killing us?
ON NOVEMBER 17, 2005, Michigan representative Pete Hoekstra wrote to John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence. Hoekstra is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He provided Negroponte a list of 40 documents recovered in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan and asked to see them. The documents were translated or summarized, given titles by intelligence analysts in the field, and entered into a government database known as HARMONY. Most of them are unclassified.
For several weeks, Hoekstra was promised a response. He finally got one on December 28, 2005, in a meeting with General Michael Hayden, principal deputy director of national intelligence. Hayden handed Hoekstra a letter from Negroponte that promised a response after January 1, 2006. Hoekstra took the letter, read it, and scribbled his terse response. “John—Unacceptable.” Hoekstra told Hayden that he would expect to hear something before the end of the year. He didn’t.
“I can tell you that I’m reaching the point of extreme frustration,” said Hoekstra, in a phone interview last Thursday. His exasperated tone made the claim unnecessary. “It’s just an indication that rather than having a nimble, quick intelligence community that can respond quickly, it’s still a lumbering bureaucracy that can’t give the chairman of the intelligence committee answers relatively quickly. Forget quickly, they can’t even give me answers slowly.”
On January 6, however, Hoekstra finally heard from Negroponte. The director of national intelligence told Hoekstra that he is committed to expediting the exploitation and release of the Iraqi documents. According to Hoekstra, Negroponte said: “I’m giving this as much attention as anything else on my plate to make this work.”
Other members of Congress—including Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Senators Rick Santorum and Pat Roberts—also demanded more information from the Bush administration on the status of the vast document collection. Santorum and Hoekstra have raised the issue personally with President Bush. This external pressure triggered an internal debate at the highest levels of the administration. Following several weeks of debate, a consensus has emerged: The vast majority of the 2 million captured documents should be released publicly as soon as possible.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon’s role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. “He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop,” says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.
The main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. “There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to ‘prove’ that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”
This is a view many officials attributed to Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. (Cambone, through a spokesman, declined to be interviewed.) For months, Cambone has argued internally against expediting the release of the documents. “Cambone is the problem,” says one former Bush administration official who wants the documents released. “He has blocked this every step of the way.” In what is perhaps a sign of a changing dynamic within the administration, Cambone is now saying that he, like his boss, favors a broad document release.
Cambone, of course, is right to fear what an “adversarial press” (read: a press whose anti-war agenda, they feel, gives them the right to “shape” the news in such a way that the “appropriate lessons” are learned) could further muddy the pre- and post-war intelligence to cast the administration’s decisions in the worst possible light—but at the same time, a growing check on an unchallenged media MSM structuring of the narrative has arisen as a result of talk radio, conservative investigative organs (like the WS and others), tenacious bloggers, etc.—that the battle over how the information gets framed may not be so worrisome as it might have been in the past.
Sure, the MSM will do its best to finesse the story in a particular way—and its overall power in creating the dominant narrative is still unparalleled. But the point is, facts are facts, and with an aggressive counter to the aggressive MSM story telling—one that reveals the rhetorical maneuvering of a not completely disinterested legacy media, their conflations, omissions of key facts, and reliance on sources (many unnamed) with dubious motives, etc,—the new media of aggressive “fact checkers” and rhetorical analysts will doubtless throw cold water on many of the MSM claims, and so further weaken their claims to “objective” truth telling.
On whole, this is a good thing—a step toward loosening the power of an elite media who clearly sees itself as a partisan check on policies with which they disagree.
Continues Hayes:
Although Hoekstra, too, has been pushing hard for the quick release of all of the documents, he is currently focusing his efforts simply on obtaining the 40 documents he asked for in November. “There comes a time when the talking has to stop and I get the documents. I requested these documents six weeks ago and I have not seen a single piece of paper yet.”
Is Hoekstra being unreasonable? I asked Michael Tanji, the former DOCEX official with the Defense Intelligence Agency, how long such a search might take. His answer: Not long. “The retrieval of a HARMONY document is a trivial thing assuming one has a serial number or enough keyword terms to narrow down a search [Hoekstra did]. If given the task when they walked in the door, one person should be able to retrieve 40 documents before lunch.”
Tanji should know. He left DIA last year as the chief of the media exploitation division in the office of document exploitation. Before that, he started and managed a digital forensics and intelligence fusion program that used the data obtained from DOCEX operations. He began his career as an Army signals intelligence [SIGINT] analyst. In all, Tanji has worked for 18 years in intelligence and dealt with various aspects of the media exploitation problem for about four years.
We discussed the successes and failures of the DOCEX program, the relative lack of public attention to the project, and what steps might be taken to expedite the exploitation of the documents in the event the push to release all of the documents loses momentum.
TWS: In what areas is the project succeeding? In what areas is the project failing?
Tanji: The level of effort applied to the DOCEX problems in Iraq and Afghanistan to date is a testament to the will and work ethic of people in the intelligence community. They’ve managed to find a number of golden nuggets amongst a vast field of rock in what I would consider a respectable amount of time through sheer brute force. The flip side is that it is a brute-force effort. For a number of reasons–primarily time and resources–there has not been much opportunity to step back, think about a smarter way to solve the problem, and then apply various solutions. Inasmuch as we’ve won in Iraq and Saddam and his cronies are in the dock, now would be a good time to put some fresh minds on the problem of how you turn DOCEX into a meaningful and effective information-age intelligence tool.
TWS: Why haven’t we heard more about this project? Aren’t most of the Iraqi documents unclassified?
Tanji: Until a flood of captured material came rushing in after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom [in October 2001], DOCEX was a backwater: unglamorous, not terribly career enhancing, and from what I had heard always one step away from being mothballed.
The classification of documents obtained for exploitation varies based on the nature of the way they were obtained and by whom. There are some agencies that tend to classify everything regardless of how it was acquired. I could not give you a ratio of unclassified to classified documents.
In my opinion the silence associated with exploitation work is rooted in the nature of the work. In addition to being tedious and time-consuming, it is usually done after the shooting is over. We place a higher value on intelligence information that comes to us before a conflict begins. Confirmation that we were right (or proof that we were wrong) after the fact is usually considered history. That some of this information may be dated doesn’t mean it isn’t still valuable.
TWS: The project seems overwhelmed at the moment, with a mere 50,000 documents translated completely out of a total of 2 million. What steps, in your view, should be taken to expedite the process?
Tanji: I couldn’t say what the total take of documents or other forms of media is, though numbers in the millions are probably not far off.
In a sense the exploitation process is what it is; you have to put eyes on paper (or a computer screen) to see what might be worth further translation or deeper analysis. It is a time-consuming process that has no adequate mechanical solution. Machine translation software is getting better, but it cannot best a qualified human linguist, of which we have very few.
Tackling the computer media problem is a lot simpler in that computer language (binary) is universal, so searching for key words, phrases, and the names of significant personalities is fairly simple. Built to deal with large-scale data sets, a forensic computer system can rapidly separate wheat from chaff. The current drawback is that the computer forensics field is dominated by a law-enforcement mindset, which means the approach to the digital media problem is still very linear. As most of this material has come to us without any context ("hard drives found in Iraq” was a common label attached to captured media) that approach means our great-grandchildren will still be dealing with this problem.
Dealing with the material as the large and nebulous data set that it is and applying a contextual appliqué after exploitation--in essence, recreating the Iraqi networks as they were before Operation Iraqi Freedom began--would allow us to get at the most significant data rapidly for technical analysis, and allow for a political analysis to follow in short order. If I were looking for both a quick and powerful fix I’d get various Department of Energy labs involved; they’re used to dealing with large data sets and have done great work in the data mining and rendering fields.
TWS: To read some of the reporting on Iraq, one might come away with the impression that Saddam Hussein was something of a benign (if not exactly benevolent) dictator who had no weapons of mass destruction and no connections to terrorism. Does the material you’ve seen support this conventional wisdom?
Tanji: I am subject to a nondisclosure agreement, so I would rather not get into details. I will say that the intelligence community has scraped the surface of much of what has been captured in Iraq and in my view a great deal more deep digging is required. Critics of the war often complain about the lack of “proof"--a term that I had never heard used in the intelligence lexicon until we ousted Saddam--for going to war. There is really only one way to obtain “proof” and that is to carry out a thorough and detailed examination of what we’ve captured.
TWS: I’ve spoken with several officials who have seen unclassified materials indicating the former Iraqi regime provided significant support--including funding and training--to transregional terrorists, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam, Algeria’s GSPC, and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Did you see any of this?
Tanji: My obligations under a nondisclosure agreement prevent me from getting into this kind of detail.
Other officials familiar with the captured documents were less cautious. “As much as we overestimated WMD, it appears we underestimated [Saddam Hussein’s] support for transregional terrorists,” says one intelligence official.
Speaking of Ansar al Islam, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist group that operated in northern Iraq, the former high-ranking military intelligence officer says: “There is no question about the fact that AI had reach into Baghdad. There was an intelligence connection between that group and the regime, a financial connection between that group and the regime, and there was an equipment connection. It may have been the case that the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] support for AI was meant to operate against the [anti-Saddam] Kurds. But there is no question IIS was supporting AI.”
The official continued: “[Saddam] used these groups because he was interested in extending his influence and extending the influence of Iraq. There are definite and absolute ties to terrorism. The evidence is there, especially at the network level. How high up in the government was it sanctioned? I can’t tell you. I don’t know whether it was run by Qusay [Hussein] or [Izzat Ibrahim] al-Duri or someone else. I’m just not sure. But to say Iraq wasn’t involved in terrorism is flat wrong.”
STILL, some insist on saying it. Since early November, Senator Carl Levin has been spotted around Washington waving a brief excerpt from a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment of Iraq. The relevant passage reads: “Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.”
Levin treats these two sentences as definitive proof that Bush administration officials knew that Saddam’s regime was unlikely to work with Islamic fundamentalists and ignored the intelligence community’s assessment to that effect. Levin apparently finds the passage so damning that he specifically requested that it be declassified.
I thought of Levin’s two sentences last Wednesday and Thursday as I sat in a Dallas courtroom listening to testimony in the deportation hearing of Ahmed Mohamed Barodi, a 42-year-old Syrian-born man who’s been living in Texas for the last 15 years. I thought of Levin’s sentences, for example, when Barodi proudly proclaimed his membership in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and again when Barodi, dressed in loose-fitting blue prison garb, told Judge J. Anthony Rogers about the 21 days he spent in February 1982 training with other members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood at a camp in Iraq.
The account he gave in the courtroom was slightly less alarming than the description of the camp he had provided in 1989, on his written application for political asylum in the United States. In that document, Barodi described the instruction he received in Iraq as “guerrilla warfare training.” And in an interview in February 2005 with Detective Scott Carr and special agent Sam Montana, both from the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, Barodi said that the Iraqi regime provided training in the use of firearms, rocket-propelled grenades, and document forgery.
Barodi comes from Hama, the town that was leveled in 1982 by the armed forces of secular Syrian dictator Hafez Assad because it was home to radical Islamic terrorists who had agitated against his regime. The massacre took tens of thousands of lives, but some of the extremists got away.
Many of the most radical Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Hama were welcomed next door—and trained—in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Spanish investigators believe that Ghasoub Ghalyoun, the man they have accused of conducting surveillance for the 9/11 attacks, who also has roots in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, was trained in an Iraqi terrorist camp in the early 1980s. Ghalyoun mentions this Iraqi training in a 2001 letter to the head of Syrian intelligence, in which he seeks reentry to Syria despite his long affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Reaching out to Islamic radicals was, in fact, one of the first moves Saddam Hussein made upon taking power in 1979. That he did not do it for ideological reasons is unimportant. As Barodi noted at last week’s hearing, “He used us and we used him.”
Throughout the 1980s, including the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam cast himself as a holy warrior in his public rhetoric to counter the claims from Iran that he was an infidel. This posturing continued during and after the first Gulf war in 1990-91. Saddam famously ordered “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) added to the Iraqi flag. Internally, he launched “The Faith Campaign,” which according to leading Saddam Hussein scholar Amatzia Baram included the imposition of sharia (Islamic law). According to Baram, “The Iraqi president initiated laws forbidding the public consumption of alcohol and introduced enhanced compulsory study of the Koran at all educational levels, including Baath Party branches.”
Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law who defected to Jordan in 1995, explained these changes in an interview with Rolf Ekeus, then head of the U.N. weapons inspection program. “The government of Iraq is instigating fundamentalism in the country,” he said, adding, “Every party member has to pass a religious exam. They even stopped party meetings for prayers.”
And throughout the decade, the Iraqi regime sponsored “Popular Islamic Conferences” at the al Rashid Hotel that drew the most radical Islamists from throughout the region to Baghdad. Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey, who covered one of those meetings in 1993, would later write: “Islamic radicals from all over the Middle East, Africa and Asia converged on Baghdad to show their solidarity with Iraq in the face of American aggression.” One speaker praised “the mujahed Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers.” Another speaker said, “Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state.” Dickey continued:
Every time I hear diplomats and politicians, whether in Washington or the capitals of Europe, declare that Saddam Hussein is a “secular Baathist ideologue” who has nothing do with Islamists or with terrorist calls to jihad, I think of that afternoon and I wonder what they’re talking about. If that was not a fledgling Qaeda itself at the Rashid convention, it sure was Saddam’s version of it.
In the face of such evidence, Carl Levin and other critics of the Iraq war trumpet deeply flawed four-year-old DIA analyses. Shouldn’t the senator instead use his influence to push for the release of Iraqi documents that will help establish what, exactly, the Iraqi regime was doing in the years before the U.S. invasion?
One criticism I hear repeatedly leveled at Hayes and his supporters—and it is a fair one, I think—is that if these documents really did back up the administration’s tacit claims that Saddam was indeed aiding and harboring (and potentially in an operational league with) Islamic jihadists, why would they not be rushing to make these documents available?
One reason, already noted above, is the not unreasonable PR fear on the part of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone that the document dump will be cherry-piced by an adversarial meeting committed, at this point, to shoring up its on years-long “narrative” on the Iraq war and its run-up, particularly as it fit into the larger narrative of the WoT (the idea of the MSM and many in the Democratic leadership being that Iraq was a distraction from the real war, which is essentially a police and intelligence war to be waged through Interpol and domestic law enforcement, with the aid of military intelligence so that we know when it’s feasible to launch a symbolic air strike on some terrorist safe haven); a second question raised by Hayes’ detractors is, why wouldn’t the administration be chomping at the bit to get this information out there as a way to overwhelm the established media narrative, rather than working hard to keep these documents close to the vest?
One interesting bit of speculation is that the administration is not relishing a battle of leaks with the CIA over who knew what when—or about how intelligence was used, misused, who was to blame and why. At least, not until Iraq is settled and stable and mostly self-sufficient—at which point, subsequent action in Syria and Iran will clear the ground for a corroborating evidence that helps to bolster the administration’s foreign policy decisions (which were supported by the intelligence—if not by the official policy positions—of many of our ostensible allies).
I’m thankful Hayes is staying on this, and I suspect ultimately the entire narrative of our “failures” to understand what was happening on the ground in Iraq will in many respects be revise to account for what we learn subsquently as we make our way through the tonnage of documents recovered after the invasion.
(h/t Stephen Meyer and Rick Moran)
****
update: See also, Austin Bay (h/t IP)
Hmmm.
My attempt at simulating a liberal:
I don’t know any [finger quotes] “facts” to support this but I believe Ted Kennedy has an ass like Shamoo.
Now I’ll return to my conservative reliance on logic. Thank you.
This really mischaracterizes what’s been going on. Essentially the Pentagon has refused to provide enough resources to make a dent in the pile. True, Cambone’s reticence is behind the foot-dragging, but it seems, now that higherups like Rumsfeld have become aware of the issue, that enthusiasm for releasing the documents has increased substantially.
It may well be that “the administration” simply didn’t know of the problem until recently. Never underestimate the ponderous nature of the elephantine bureaucracies.
Possible. But anybody who’s been following Hayes’ work closely knows that he’s consistently pressed the issue with the administration. My guess is, the Bushies now believe victory in Iraq is all be secured, and so they are now preparing themselves to react to the established history that we had “no justification” to go to war (though the WMD rationale was only but one in a number of reasons given for the use of force—not the least of which was Saddam’s persistent secrecy and refusal to fully comply with an inspections regime).
Well, these documents arn’t going to be made available to the public, anytime soon.
The reason?
Well, if such documents were made public, they would most likely cause most people to reach a decision opposite of the one Hayes would like you to reach.
Make the documents public, and public support for the war will most likely drop even farther.
Looks to me, Goldstein, that the Neocons, through one of the main mouthpieces, are still trying to justify their failed military adventurism, after the fact.
Can’t blame ‘em.
No WMDs. Failing public support for the war. So The Weekly Standard, via one of its main flaks, moves into action.
The length of Hayes’ article points more to lack of substance than any proof of an Iraq/Al QUada connection.
Hayes is engaging in a futile task, but I expect he’s being well-paid for it.
Seems to me, “Goss,” that you are acting a bit too overly familiar with me, the host of this site. And I’m beginning to take offense.
Listen—I rarely reply to your “analysis” because it seldom rises to the level of anything beyond Kos-cribbed boilerplate reworked so as to sound even stupider than it did in the original. It is inveterately contrarian, adheres to no fundamental ideology philosophy (though it tacks precisely along partisan lines), and it is so simplistic—and so dependent upon caricaturish depictions of your political opponents, as well as a Hollywood notion of how “the government” works—that it is the stuff of undergrad PoliSci papers written for an unreconstructed left-leaning professor.
Frankly, you bore me. But if others wish to continue dealing with your sophomoric piddle, more power to them. Me, I tire of your constant and predictable response to every post I put up, and I address you now only to let you know that I don’t want you calling me “Goldstein” ever again. If you don’t like the rules—or if you’re not willing to treat with a degree of respect, however grudging, the person who hosts your not infrequently inanities—then you can fuck right off. And I’m happy to help that along.
Understood?
Well Goss,
It would seem that the enemies’ 5th column has come here to throw feces around. Again.
Can you, no strike that, you CAN’T, point to one fact in your latest stream of multi-colored vomit.
That was nothing but a pile of liberal garbage, garnished with a few sprigs of untruth.
How did your head get so far “into” your ass?
Y’know, Carl, I’d be careful to hedge my bets on that if I were you.
One of the things that’s struck me from the beginning about that particular line of thought—“Saddam is secular, and opposes the religious fanatics”—is the degree to which the Smart Party reveals its utter ignorance of the cultural nuance they’re so proud of understanding. They’re wrenching a tidbit from a culture they clearly know nothing about, and projecting their own attitudes and preconceptions into it: “secular” in an Arab context has only the dimmest relation to what it means to, say, a professor at Princeton.
I suspect that the principal reason for not making a push to translate and publish the documents is that 99+% of them are likely to be dead boring. Bureaucrats are bureaucrats, and memos justifying the memo justifying the order to transfer four tons of flour from province A to province B aren’t likely to be any more exciting in Arabic than they are in English, French, German, Russian, Chinese, or the speech of the intelligent octopoids of Betelgeuse IX-B.
Regards,
Ric
So then brevity would contains its own proof? OK. You are an ass.
BINGO! I’ll take blueberry.
Pie, that is.
There is more to transnational terrorism than al Qaeda, which you may have realized, had you bothered to read the article.
Jeff, you responded
I have been following Hayes’ dogged persistence. Mostly he’s dealt with underlings. I’m not sure “the administration” (that’s such a nebulous term I’m not sure what it means) was really aware of what’s going on until just recently. I’m also not convinced this is part of some newly-formed strategy to deal with the information wars now that Iraq is “over”.
The administration has shown a remarkable lack of interest in engaging with the chattering classes. I’m wondering what makes you think they’ve now decided to engage? (It would be welcome, if true.)
I’m seriously considering a public proposal to the Pentagon.
Let’s open up a few storage areas, so everyone who claims that there were “No WMDs” can take a bath in the recovered WMDs to prove their point.
That’s one more pathetic bald-faced lie that if I never hear it again, will come twenty million years too soon.
TW: basis. Well, that would be obvious.
I’m not going to press the issue, antimedia, but let me put it this way: Hayes writes for one of the most important pubications read by those in positions of power within the administration. Likewise, he has gone on a number of TV shows pressing the issue.
I find it difficult to believe three years in that the higher-ups in the administration and DoD are just now learning that there has been a strong call among conservatives for a release of these documents. And in fact, Hayes has reported on a few occasions that his attempts to get them have been actively rebuffed.
So take it for what it’s worth. My speculation, which you highlight, I believe tacks pretty closely to Hayes’ own understanding of why he’s been having trouble getting the documents released—namely, the those in the admnistration who worry about such things are concerned that it could lead to a leak war by the CIA or other agencies against the admninistration.
Another thing to consider is that this NSA leak—and the DoJ’s willingness to institute an investigation—could put certain agencies on notice, making it more likely that the ground has been cleared for the release of the information without fear of backdoor conniving.
So, 50k documents have been reviewed out of a total of two million, yet you know what they contain? I don’t mean to pile on, Carl, but your pretense of knowledge is breathtaking.
yours/
peter.
Interesting thoughts. I think you’re probably right that this may be a “coming out” party against the “rebels” in the CIA.
For those questioning why the Pentagon and Langley haven’t done more to exploit the potential of these documents, it might be instructive to look at the backstory to the “Mitrokhin Archive” – even though the documents in that instance were a gold mine of detail regarding KGB and GRU operations going back some forty years, it took several attempts before Vassili Mitrokhin could convince anyone in either CIA or MI6 of the self-evident value of what he had to offer. Diplomatic historian Christopher Andrew provides the declassified details of this in Sword and Shield (Basic Books, 2005) Bureaucratic inertia, the press of events, and just plain skepticism played a role in Mitrokhin’s case just as they appear to have done here.
Mr. Goldstein,
I think you and your fellow correspondents have nailed the problem: bureaucratic inertia combined with the Bush administration’s lack of concern of what beltway bullshit artists have to say.
There are many rich veins to mine here as the CIA/DIA does not wish to sully itself with documents (well, okay, an entire archive) recovered not by the clever colleagues of Plame or Scheuer, but when an infantry sergeant shot the lock off the warehouse. Remember what happened when Saddam’s sons-in-law defected to Syria? The US Embassy turned them away despite the fact that Hussien Kamel was in charge of Iraq’s chemical and bio weapons program. This led to the embarrasing (for the UN and coalition) revelation of a second layer of Iraqi weaponry in violation of the cease-fire agreement. The following year’s “Bay of Goats” was not the CIA’s finest hour, either.
The “no connection with terrorism” is preposterous on its face as Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal were public guests of Saddam!
The Rove rope-a-dope continues…
The MSM won’t publish it until they come up with a way to blame Bush.
It is like the army and enemy body counts – whatever they release the press will argue about it.
We had a DOCEX team get established in Afghanistan (at least where I was stationed). Very small group, very busy – and a lot of what they were looking at wasn’t deep stuff, it was more tactical in nature. I believe that those who have mentioned a lack of raw manpower related to this are correct.
I suppose a quick scan n’ dump of docs would provide lots of work for the four layers of editors…after the appropriate cherry-picking, of course.
Heh. I read that as “invertibrately contrarian.”
Not what you wrote, but I like it so much I had to say it.
Not enough translators seems to be one problem. Why doesn’t the government release some of the documents on the Internet in Arabic? There are more Arabic-readers connected to the Internet than are employed by the government, and they can probably do a better and quicker job of translating and noting significant information (even if Juan Cole applies his expertise to the effort).
Might this be something for the Civilian Language Reserve Corps to tackle?
I would guess a large part of the problem is simple beureaucratic intrasigence and groupthink. The documents are classified, therefore it’s important that they not be released.
I mean if they were meant to be released, why would they be classified?
Perhaps they need to subcontract to an Israeli company. They probably would if they could get past the agency anti-semites.
Rick Moran over at Right Wing Nut House suggests that Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Steve Cambone, has been sitting on it because he didn’t want the MSM cherry-picking it and using it against the administration. Frankly, he might have had a point, but timing is everything. And now might be a good time to release the information.
It’s unbelievable to me that we must still fight this battle, but apparently we must.
Let’s pretend that we are partying like it’s 2000 again. George W. Bush is still Governor of Texas.
Would any modestly informed modestly rational modestly sentient human being believe that Saddam Hussein had absolutely no connection with AQ?
That would be no.
Anyone who thinks that a secular Muslim and an Islamist guy can’t work together is too ignorant to debate.
Jeff, I read every Iraq cite in the 9/11 report. The following is the only on point reference to AQ in Iraq –
Page 66
But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.76
There are references to supporting Al Insar – an anti-Kurdish rebel group whom Saddam apparently supported to some extent. But the general consensus of 9/11 is given above.
Jake
Has Hayes ever actually seen any of this documents? Probably not. Largely I suppose, because he has no security clearance.
I take it these documents he’s shilling are classified, arn’t they?
How does he know exactly what information they contain one way or another?
Well, that was a sudden but inevitable reversal—back to the “don’t anyone dare release classified information (that might weaken our side’s argument against the war)!” POV.
Should take only one more of these to make a perfectly exquisite half-hitch knot.
Jakey : That passage alone is a far stretch removed from no connection to terrorism, no ?
The left-wing meme that there was “no connection to terrorism” is shown to be ridiculous yet again. If there were no terrorists in Iraq before, then where did all the car bombers come from? I though the idea of spontaneous creation was discredited by scientists years ago.
Who cares if Saddam trained terrorists? Abramoff gave people money <i>and he knows people who know George Bush!</b> So we know where the REAL evil lies!
…we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship…
“…and we herein affirm (in hindsight) that we’d be damn sure a mushroom cloud appeared over Los Angeles before we’d screw up the courage to mount a pro-active war against terrorism, because, you know, nobody is going to accuse us of going to war for oil.”
Goss—proof postive that fruitcakes do indeed survive the Christmas season.
JD, I spoke to Jeff’s comment:
“One of the most dogged detractors of the increasingly “official†pre-war intel historyâ€â€specifically, of the notion that Iraq had no ties to Islamic terrorism or al Qaeda (a broad assertion offered dismissively by Bush war detractors that has been debunked by, among others, the 911 Commission Report and the NYT)..”
The AUMF is pretty specific to 9/11 and it’s perps. No AQ, no direct link between OBL and and Iraq, no business being in Iraq.
There is no doubt terrorism needs to be addressed. There is also genuine disbelief on my part that addressing terrorism and Iraq have anything to do with each other.
Jake
Jake,
Your logic facilities are once again broken. The AUMF was passed by Congress more than a year before the Congress authorized the Iraq war.
The 911 commission itself ignored many connections between Iraq and Al Queda.
It is not only the vast amount of paper and insufficient tranlators which is the problem,it is enough of the latter who can also understand the bureaucratic and military jargon therein.
I would suspect that no country has the trained manpower to complete the task of translating and cataloguing the documents in a realistic timescale.
Israel has the ability to translate for us, but anti-semitism in Foggy Bottom stands in the way.
Folks, the documents are UNclassified. OK? UNclassified. The problem is not getting the documents declassified. The problem is getting the documents released.
To answer some, who have questioned Hayes’ source of his knowledge, it comes both from the titles and summaries of the document contents (which are already available) and interviews with people involved in the DOCEX program.
It’s a longstanding tradition in the military that, if you don’t want something to succeed, you praise it openly and starve it for money quietly. If you don’t want 2 million unclassified documents released to the public, you just say, “We haven’t finished translating them.”. Then you make sure they don’t have enough translators to do the job and, if anybody questions the staffing, you simply say, “Translators are in high demand. These are all we can get.”
It amazes me how little knowledge Americans have of how ponderous and slow-moving a bureaucracy can be – especially a military one.
Amen.
The left either believes that this Administration is like the ultra diabolocal secretive government in the movies that plays three dimensional chess with the various alphabet agencies, all the while manipulating the pupper manipulators, or……..
so incompetent that one office of the Administration doesn’t have any idea what any other offices are doing and don’t care.
And in many instances accuse the Administration of being both in the same sentence.
As with any large beauracratic conglomorate with Agencies or Bureaus concerned about their own little bit of turf, the truth probably lies somewhere in between the two extremes.
Walter,
The problem is not that of merely translating the documents but understanding the significance and cross referencing a couple of million of them.
There is an amazing range of expertise required.
It is also likely that the military do not want to release documents that have not been translated,then have to comment on the contents with the MSM.
Robin, you are correct, there are two Authorizations. Does anyone know to which one Bush refers when he speaks of the AUMF? Is it the Iraq one, or the Afghanistan one?.
And Robin, as I said, I was referrig to JEFF’S use of the 9/11 report. I was not making any comments beyond his use.
Jake
Jake, I think that’s kind of the point. This is a fairly precise statement. In the military/intelligence world, an “operation” is what happens when you actually go out and do something. So if Saddam knew the date, time and personnel for the 9/11 olperation, suggested targeting, or provided funding to al Qaeda specifically for the 9/11 operation, that would be a “collaborative operational relationship.”
If, on the other hand, Saddam merely provided safe harbor for al Qaeda people, or medical care for al Qaeda leaders injured in Afghanistan, or provided places where al Qaeda could meet openly with other Salafist fascists, that would constitute support but it wouldn’t be an operational relationship.
The list of things I mention as support without being an operational relationship wasn’t chosen blindly.
Jake, is either one out of force?
Not that it much matters, since we know that once a declaration of war is made, we are entitled to carry the war to the operational and logistical support lines, as well as any allies. (See, eg, the declaration of war in December 1941.)
Jake, who is Hikmat Shakir?
Where did Richard Clarke think UBL would run if ISI tipped him to the U2 overflights?
Who was allegedly collaborating at al-Shifa?
Where did Zarqawi go upon leaving Afghanistan in 2002?
Are you kidding?
Charlie, I think it does matter. The AUMF for Afghanistan is broader based, even though specific to 9/11 in my reading. The Iraq AUMF really seems to read as if once there is no longer a capability for Iraq to foment terrorisim (not that there was before) then the AUMF runs out of it’s own accord.
Or at least arguably it does.
Anyway, that’s my reading of it.
As for OBL, I don’t know where he would have gone. The 9/11 report doesn’t lean toward Iraq as a safe harbor for Al Qaeda and OBL in particular.
Jake
Jake,
The 9/14/01 AUMF is not specific to Afghanistan. Your reading seems to rely on an unknown Gospel.
If Jake wants an all-purpose reference, I’ve got a copy of the Majestic-12 documents somewhere I can sell him…
Psst -Guinness: ixnay on the ajesticMay elvetway. The CSM was specific – Jake is not to know.
When is the “adversary press” going to start treating terrorists as an adversary?
Oh, and as to why the Bush admin has not yet pressed to have the docs declassified:
I think we can see the preferred modus operandi in the Bush camp’s supposedly belated response to antiwar critics last month. I say “supposedly” because to me it really looks like they’re letting the Dems have enough rope to hang themselves before cinching the noose.
I’m not sure they care enough about the 2006 elections to push on this yet, though I wouldn’t be surprised if a major effort got underway this summer. But you can bet in 2008 Iraq will still be an issue, and they will want to be able to hammer the Dems with their own statements when it comes out that Saddam trained thousands of terrorists.
Notice Hillary still hasn’t joined that lefty bandwagon, despite immense pressure to do so.
That Weekly Standard article is, at best, dubious. The magazines editor, William Kristol, is the son of one of the founding fathers of the radical neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol-which I believe has hijacked the true conservative party. And before his father, it was Leo Strauss. Bill Kristol, a regular political commentator on Fox News(the right-wing propaganda machine) is joined by Michale Lendeen, which is obvious with his writings such as:
And let’s not forget about the PNAC, which calls for the US to gain control of Persian oil-hence the lies about WMD. If you scroll to the bottom of the page in the link above, you will see that the Bush administration had, or did have many of the same members. What I find interesting is not just Dick Cheney being a member of both, but of John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz and their positions now as recess appointment of ambassador to the UN and president of the World Bank.
My questions, and keeping in mind rebuffed Bush administration darlings Ahmed Chalabi and ‘Curveball’, are:
1. Who is to say that these so-called documents of proof were not planted by someone like those two looking to gain power or make a few million? We already know it’s been tried before.
2. What difference would it make if the fact that they found them was released or talked about by the Bush administration now? They could tell the public that they have not been through all of them, but the ones they have suggest that Iraq had al Qaeda training grounds. A statement like that would cover them in their assertions before the war but not yet claim solid proof AND take the heat off of them because of the wrong contentions before the war that has been dogging this administration. Saying that they should wait doesn’t hold water-even to use against Democrats in the upcoming elections. If it’s true, which I doubt, the timing in the release of the information wouldn’t matter.
There are good reasons to suspect the validity of those documents. The facts I have shown above are just a few of them.
There are arabic OCR programs, and I am sure there are machine translation programs, too.
Run everything through the OCR and the translator, and pick out interesting stuff for further review.
I question the reliability of Muslim translators anyway, since they have already demonstrated their split allyance.
I feel like Winston Smith in here. You all say up is down and down is up and no quantity of facts and data has any effect. Dissenters are tolerated briefly before they are dismissed as piddle-spouting, shithead traitor whack jobs. But what the fuck, I guess that’s what I am, and might as well get in some blows before I am shown the door. And if you like the bloodsport of “debate” so much, come hang out on my blogroll sometime.
No one on the left disputes that Sadaam supported “terrorists.” He gave payments to Palestinian suicide bombers for fucks sake. That is one of the countless strawmen in this fight about the pre-war narrative. And no one on the left disputes the fact that Sadaam is a barbaric piece of shit who deserves to rot in a jail cell for the rest of his days. Though we do love that shot of Rummie shaking his hand so pleasantly in 1983. Ahhhh, the hypocricy of realpolitik.
The relevant question is if Sadaam had links to Al-Qaeda or had any agency in the 9/11 attacks, and if invading Baghdad and toppling his regime was sound US foriegn policy. The answer so far to all of the above, is a big NO (you may now use your magic decoder rings to change that to a YES). Even GHWB thought it was folly to take the man out because of the hell it would unleash on the region. If only the son had as much sense.
According to the recent Zogby poll, 85% of US soldiers in Iraq think that they are there as retribution for 9/11. That is because Bushco and the rightie blogosphere (present company included) have repeatedely reinforced this fanciful talking point. Of course, 70% of those soldiers also favor a pull out of US forces. Are they all a bunch of seditionist-coward-lilly-livered moonbats who drank MSM kool aid? Discuss.
As for Zarqawi, don’t forget that your Dear Leader had a chance to pick him off before the invasion at his camp in Kurdistan, but chose not to, as that would remove a pretext for launching Armageddon. So much for national security above partisan concern.
[url=”http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4431601/” target=”_blank”]
Consider the case of Jamal al-Ghurairy, the Iraqi lieutenant general who first discussed the Salman Pak training facility with Frontline and the NYT eight weeks after September 11, 2001. The Beirut meeting, arranged by none other than Ahmed Chalabi, featured a man claiming to be Mr. Ghurairy who we now know was an imposter and liar on the INC payroll (funded by US taxpayers of course). The real Ghurairy never left Iraq. See more below.
<a href=”http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/03/heroes_in_error.html” target=”_blank”>
Perhaps the administration may not want these Iraq documents broadly discussed because they might be gun shy about using more bogus INC propaganda. But if they keep it relegated to the wingnut fringe like the “General Saba” story it will be a nice sop to the base. Because, for Bush and Co you guys are suckers. You are the ideological foot soldiers for a cynical and craven bunch of oligarchs who don’t give a rats ass about liberty or democracy. The speak only one language. Power.
Jeff, I am continually amazed by the way you apply your high-minded high falutin rhetorical firepower to wax on about liberal western values and universal individual rights, and the glory of our founding fathers and The Constituion and yet you shamelessly act as a flak and apologist for a litany of brazenly undemocratic actions by this Administration which has been so hostile to that very tradition. (See also: renditions, detentions, torture policy, NSA wiretaps, Abu Ghraib, Clarke, Powell, Wilkerson, Wilson, Sibel Edmods, WHIG, unitary executive, [/url]<a href=”http://democrats.reform.house.gov/IraqOnTheRecord/” target=”_blank”>, etc)
In each case you lash out at the left for being hysterical and acting in bad faith and engaging in vulgar politics. But the evidence overwhelmingly supports the opposite. It has been Karl Rove and the GOP that have exploited 9/11, issued terror alerts before the 2004 elections (and not one since), resorted to ad hominem attacks and character assasinations rather than confront the substance of the opposition’s arguments.
Fukuyama and Buckley have finally come to their disingenous and self-serving senses about Bushco and Iraq. It’s not too late for the rest of you.
Bring on more movie lists and talks with inanimate objects. Those have more value to the world than all of your grad school prattle abour signifiers.
PS For what it’s worth I liked the post from Salman Rushdie et al.
Now you know how we feel everytime we speak to you.
And if you don’t like what I write, take off. My grad school prattle about signifiers is, in my estimation, the most important part of what I do. But you aren’t forced to read them.
By the way, here’s Jesse Taylor, formerly of Pandagon, now an aide to some Ohio congressional candidate:
I’ve bolded a bit for your convenience.
You can see my response—which addresses some of your other concerns—here. But I’m not going to bother responding anymore, because the combination of historical amnesia, question begging, and falsehoods you spout—all in a tone of bemused exasperation—simply doesn’t move me to engage you seriously.
OK, I stand corrected. Lefties get sloppy and imprecise and collapse “terrorists” with Al-Qaeda. Thanks for setting me straight on that score. Bad Pandagon. Was that a case of willful deceit? I think not. Just muddle-headedness. I will slap John at the next Vast Leftwing Conspiracy Confab. But, um, shouldn’t we hold the president and his Administration to a higher standard?
The Through the Looking Glass feeling was of course part of my point: you won’t engage seriously with anyone who presents invonvenient facts. Your response is code for: “Crikey, I don’t have time to deal with you, it is much easier to get on my soapbox and preach to the choir, and to haul out my completely irrelevant critique of post modern identity politics.” I can sympathize, which is why I have never made this trip to the “dark side” before. If I had a blog, I would feel exactly the same way. “Hey buddy, if you don’t like it here leave.” You could do what Malkin does and not have comments at all. But you do allow feedback, so suck it up.
In keeping with liberal western values, which is of course where we all agree, you have opened this virtual commons as it were, and your assertions and arguments deserve a response, they deserve dialogue. Your receipt of cranky and snarky comments is all part and parcel of the enterprise, as is your “talk to the hand” rebuff. No surprises there. Live by the bemused tone, die by the bemused tone.
Frankly, how could anyone with an anti-war point of view enter this hornet’s nest with any tone other than bemused exasperation? If you guys aren’t swayed by the myriad whistleblowers, mounds of documented evidence, and testimony from Administration apostates who have mounted more withering and powerful critiques of the Bushco’s misdeeds than I can muster, then I don’t stand a chance. Even Buckley and Fukuyama would get flamed here.
But seriously, as a blogger, you must at some level, hope just a teensy weensy bit that someone such as myself would be swayed just a little by your meme-a-thon. You want converts to your side, doncha? If so, then you gotta do the work.
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