WASHINGTON - The Bush administration Wednesday night released the first declassified documents collected by U.S. intelligence during the Iraq war, showing among other things that Saddam Hussein's regime was monitoring reports that Iraqis and Saudis were heading to Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks to fight U.S. troops.
The documents, the first of thousands expected to be declassified over the next several months, were released via a Pentagon Web site at the direction of National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.
Many were in Arabic — with no English translation — including one the administration said showed that Iraqi intelligence officials suspected al-Qaida members were inside Iraq in 2002.
The Pentagon Web site described that document this way: "2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between IRS members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names."
The release of the documents, expected to continue for months, is designed to allow lawmakers and the public to investigate what documents from Saddam's regime claimed about such controversial issues as weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida in the period before the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003.
The Web site cautioned that the U.S. government "has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available."
The first big question I have to ask is, why is the Bush administration even releasing all these documents? This is an administration that loves secrecy, and yet they are supposedly releasing thousands of Iraqi documents that were collected by U.S. intelligence during the Iraq war. What is the Bush White House trying to prove here--that they were justified in invading Iraq? If I recall, the original White House arguments for invading Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was acquiring nuclear weapons, and that if we didn't invade, we'd be seeing mushroom clouds over New York. Only after the weapons inspectors went into Iraq, did we realize that Saddam was nowhere near to building nukes. And then the White House went into PR-spin in making up more and more explanations for its invasion--Saddam was harboring terrorists, Saddam was an evil dictator (an Adolf Hitler), Saddam was supressing his people, and so on.
Now we come to this interesting part of the story:
A handful of prewar Iraq government documents released Wednesday had been translated into English.
They included one Iraqi intelligence document indicating Saddam's feared Fedayeen paramilitary forces were investigating rumors in the fall of 2001 that as many as 3,000 Iraqis and Saudis were going to fight in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion.
"In the report on the status of rumors for November of 2001 regarding Fedayeen Saddam in al-Anbar, there is an entry that indicates that there is a group of Iraqi and Saudi Arabians numbering around 3,000 who have gone in an unofficial capacity to Afghanistan and have joined the mujahidin (mujahedeen, or holy warriors) to fight with and aid them in defeating the American Zionist Imperialist attack," the translated document stated.
On the surface, this translated document seems to support the Bush administration's assertions that Saddam was harboring terrorists--hey, 3000 Iraqis and Saudis went into Afghanistan to fight against the U.S. invasion. Of course, I would also have to ask how many Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Iranians, and other Muslim men throughout the Middle Eastern countries also went to Afghanistan to fight against the U.S. invasion? Why haven't we invaded these other Middle Eastern countries that allowed their citizens to join the mujahedeen in Afghanistan?
I'm not going to say that the Bush White House was wrong in releasing these documents--they will certainly be important to future historians in analyzing the events of the Iraq war. But I have to question the motives for the Bush administration in releasing these documents. I have to wonder if the Bush White House has pre-screened these documents, and have pulled out those pages that may be damaging to the Bush administration's PR-image. I also have to wonder if this release of Iraqi intelligence documents is nothing more than a diversion, so that Congress can look over these Iraqi intelligence documents rather than demanding the White House hand over the flawed intelligence assessments that the Bush administration used to market their invasion of Iraq--it is certainly interesting that these documents are still in Arabic and have no English translations, meaning that congressional investigators would have to translate the documents first, before determining what was in them. As always with this administration, there is a political calculation in any action this Bush White House undertakes.
The question is, what is the political calculation for releasing these documents and why?
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