Posted on 03/27/2006 3:24:05 PM PST by Dark Skies
The federal government is making public a huge trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq, posting them on the Internet in a step that is at once a nod to the Web's power and an admission that U.S. intelligence resources are overloaded.
Republican leaders in Congress pushed for the release, which was first proposed by conservative commentators and bloggers hoping to find evidence about the fate of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, or possible links to terror groups.
The Web surfers have begun posting translations and comments, digging through the documents with gusto. The idea of the government turning over a massive database to volunteers is revolutionary -- and not only to them.
"Let's unleash the power of the Internet on these documents," said House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. "I don't know if there's a smoking gun on WMD or not. But it will give us a better understanding of what was going on in Iraq before the war."
The documents' value is uncertain -- intelligence officials say that they are giving each one a quick review to remove anything sensitive. Skeptics of the war, suspicious of the Bush administration, believe that means the postings are either useless or cherry-picked to bolster arguments for the war.
The documents -- Iraqi memos, training guides, reports, transcripts of conversations, audiotapes and videotapes -- have spurred a flurry of news reports. The Associated Press, for instance, reported on memos from Saddam Hussein in 1987 ordering plans for a chemical attack on Kurds and comments from Hussein and his aides in the 1990s, searching for ways to prove they didn't have weapons.
Hoekstra said it took months of arguing with intelligence officials before he and John Negroponte, the new Director of National Intelligence, agreed to make the documents public. None contain current information about the Iraqi insurgency, and U.S. intelligence officials say they are focusing their limited resources on learning about what's happening on the ground now.
There are up to 55,000 boxes, with possibly millions of pages. The documents are being posted a few at a time -- so far, about 600 -- on a Pentagon Web site, often in Arabic with an English summary.
Regardless of what they reveal, open-government advocates like the decision to make them available.
It's a "radical notion," said Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. That "members of the public could contribute to the intelligence analysis process. ... That is a bold innovation."
Champions of the Internet as a "citizen's media" embraced the step, too.
"The secret of the 21st century is attract a lot of smart people to focus on problems that you think are important," said Glenn Reynolds, the conservative blogger at Instapundit.com and author of "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths."
"It's kind of like a swarm. It's a lot of individual minds looking at it from different angles. The stuff that's most interesting tends to bubble to the top," he said.
A self-described Iraqi blogger translated one of the documents for the American blog pajamasmedia.com -- a Sept. 15, 2001, memo from the Iraqi intelligence service that reported about an Afghan source who had been told that a group from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban had visited Iraq.
Some remain doubtful, suspecting that the administration only releases information that puts President Bush and his arguments for war in a good light. The Iraq Survey Group found no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction after the war, and the Sept. 11 commission reported it found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaida.
"I would bet that the materials that they chose to post were the ones that were suggestive of a threat," said John Prados, author of the book, "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."
Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute, dismissed the documents: "The collection is good material for somebody who wants to do a biography of Saddam Hussein, but in terms of saying one thing or the other about weapons of mass destruction, it's not there."
One of several conservative blogs devoting attention to the release, Powerline.com, set up a separate page to catalog its findings and news reports on what the documents reveal.
"These documents are going to shed a lot of light on a regime that was quite successful in maintaining secrecy," said John Hinderaker, one of three men who run the site. "Before the first Gulf War, Saddam was perilously close to getting nuclear weapons and people didn't know it. The evils of the regime will be reflected."
But he also cautioned the optimistic. "When you're dealing with millions of pages of documents," he said, "it's a big mistake to think you can pull out one page or sentence out of a document and say 'Eureka, this is it.'"
The new media rules!
....time to kick some Dhimmicrat ass
Yeah, and the libs are choking on it!!! GOOD!
The three-letter agencies are still trying to recover from the dessimation of the Clinton years that not only tore the agencies apart, but built barriers between them as we know from the revelations of ABLE DANGER.
Good move on the part of the adminstration.
So much has already been found. Hand this guy his platter of crow.
ABC's coverage of this, with its editorial notes, pretty much shows their hand.
They will be out-flanked once again and still not catch on.
Here is another example of where his strategery works!
The beauty of it is that it doesn't MATTER what the MSM does. Their days are numbered.
It's a "radical notion," said Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. That "members of the public could contribute to the intelligence analysis process. ... That is a bold innovation."Champions of the Internet as a "citizen's media" embraced the step, too.
"The secret of the 21st century is attract a lot of smart people to focus on problems that you think are important," said Glenn Reynolds, the conservative blogger at Instapundit.com and author of "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths."
"It's kind of like a swarm. It's a lot of individual minds looking at it from different angles. The stuff that's most interesting tends to bubble to the top," he said.
Mr. Prados' book sales DEPEND on ignoring all evidence of Iraqi involvement in terror and WMD. His comments are to be expected, and laughed at...
Three years on, I think that what happened with regard to Iraq's weapons has become fairly clear. At least, to me.
Here's what we know:
1) There was massive intelligence suggesting that Iraq posessed weapons of mass destruction. This is almost universally agreed upon.
2) No satisfactory explanation of what happened to them has ever been officially offered. I don't believe Saddam got rid of them voluntarily, as some would have us believe. Nor is it possible - given what we know - that they were never there.
3) The most obvious explanation is that they were moved.
But, if they were moved, why would they have been moved, who would have moved them, and where would they have been moved to?
I don't know all of it. But here's what I think.
Russia was involved, during the 1990's, in supplying additional WMD to Iraq - probably in exchange for hard cash. When war became imminent, they repossessed the weapons - offering Saddam diplomatic support (and possibly other weapons) in exchange.
The Administration has been aware of this. Probably for years. That's why they've remained strangely silent about possible movement of the weapons.
Simply put, if it were to be revealed to the American people that was what had happened, the United States and Russia would become enemies once more.
The whole world must be pinging this web site. I couldn't get through. Timed out.
I just tried and it was busy...so it isn't just you.
ping
They are all fake... unless one sentence indicates Bush told a fib!
I'm thinking that the government will turn over all its UFO docs to bloggers. Yee haw!
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