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Iraq Pre-War Intel Being Ignored, Says Top Republican (purchase mustard gas and anthrax in 2000)
CNSNews ^ | July 12, 2006 | Monisha Bansal

The Republican chairman of the U.S. House committee with jurisdiction over foreign intelligence, conceded Tuesday that the many documents discovered by the U.S. military in Iraq following the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime are no longer a priority for most intelligence experts.

Those documents, as Cybercast News Service previously reported, included memos containing the letterhead of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and revealing Saddam's purchase of mustard gas and anthrax - both considered weapons of mass destruction - as recently as the summer of 2000 and his extensive ties to al Qaeda.

"I believe there is still a tremendous amount of stuff on pre-war Iraq that we do not know and that we do not understand," said U.S. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Hoekstra said many intelligence experts consider the information irrelevant. "Everything that I'm working on within the intelligence community on pre-war Iraq and better understanding pre-war Iraq, tells me it is no longer a priority for the intelligence community," he said.

Last month Hoekstra and U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) cited the declassified portion of an intelligence report as evidence that approximately 500 weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed by American-led coalition forces since 2003 and that the U.S. and its allies were in a race against terrorist groups trying to control the remaining weapons.

In February Hoekstra's committee began examining 48,000 boxes of Iraqi documents that had not yet been translated or catalogued. The search reveals that "Saddam Hussein was not only trying to hide his illegal weapons program from the world, but was also interested in aiding international terrorists," Hoekstra said Tuesday.