Guest Essay--JVeritas at Heart of America

Heart of America ^ | 10-04-06 | jveritas

[TheRobb7]

As part of our Guest Essay series, I asked Joseph Shahda to write for us on the topic of translating Sadaam Hussien's captured documents.

Mr. Shahda, who goes by the screen name "jveritas" on FreeRepublic.com, has had a article written about him in the Boston Globe: ( http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/03/18/us_puts_iraqi_documents_on_the_web/ )

"Joseph Shahda earns his living as an engineer. But in his spare time, he's an intelligence agent, working to ferret out the truth about the regime of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

When the US government on Thursday began publishing captured Iraqi government documents on the Internet, Shahda eagerly began to translate the files into English and publish them on a conservative website.

''I feel a sense of duty," said Shahda, a native of Lebanon who supports President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. ''I think it's a duty for people who know Arabic to translate the documents."

Without further ado, here is the "jveritas" essay for Heart of America:

“Since March 2006 the Pentagon has released thousands of documents captured in Iraq and that belongs to different departments and apparatus in Saddam regime, like the Iraq intelligence services, the Iraqi military institutions, Saddam Presidential secretariat, etc…

Some of documents that were released so far contain some very important information about Saddam's very strong connections to terrorism, and some prove that the Saddam regime has kept secret programs related to WMD and the precursors required to make WMD.

[jveritas]

Well no matter what I say you cannot convince someone whose mind is set in refusing the importance of the documents.

[TheRobb7]

I don't think he's refusing the importance of the documents so much as disputing the outcome that you've arrived at.

Perhaps if you were to address what the DIA actually has done, with links, and compare that to all that you have done.

Anyway, thanks again for your contribution!

[jveritas]

Here is what the Senate Intelligence report says about the Iraqi documents (pages 62 and 63) http://intelligence.senate.gov/phaseiiaccuracy.pdf :

(U) The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is leading the exploitation effort of documents (DocEx) uncovered in Iraq, told Committee staff that 120 million plus pages of documents that were recovered in Iraq have received an initial review for intelligence information. As of January 2006 34million pages have been translated and summarized to some extent and are available to analysts in an Intelligence Community database.

As I said before, I noticed from the "summaries" of the documents posted on FMSO website that in some cases the translators made synopsis that did not depict the most important finding of the document. Based on this, I think the translators have missed some very important issues related to WMD and Saddam regime relation to terrorism.

[avacado]

Jveritas,

Do you remember that committee a while back that looked at the Pentagon's IPP project and discussed the Iraq Documents? Someone posted a video of the entire meeting and it was almost 2 hours worth. I viewed it and did a write up on it here in FreeRepublic.

Anyway, all the documents were given an initial scrub in the field and they were looking for one thing and one thing only and that is locations of stockpiles of WMD. They were not looking for terrorist links, WMD programs, or anything that was not a direct hit on stockpiles of WMD.

So yes, they have been reviewed but the question that needs to be asked it what were they looking for in the initial reviews? And the answer is that they were ONLY looking for existing locations of stockpiles of WMD. Anything else they disregarded.

[jveritas]

You are correct. That is why I think the relation to terrorism and WMD programs were missed to a very large degree because the focus was on WMD stockpiles. The translators must have an good background on prohibited chemical materials and other prohibited WMD precursors in order to catch Saddam regime continuous work on WMD programs, I think that very few of them really make the effort to look at each chemical material mentioned in the documents to check if it a precursors material that can be used to make WMD.