The Document Refuseniks

There is an effort afoot to discredit any material that may undermine the narrative that "Bush lied us into war" and that Saddam's connection to al Qaeda was tenuous at best. Consider this quote from an AP wire story today:

[John] Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental 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."

Prados knows "it's not there," even if he hasn't read all the documents -- the vast majority of which haven't been made public let alone translated. Of course, he has a book out saying Bush lied us into war, so there CAN'T be anything that contradicts the book he already wrote. The same holds for Peter Bergen, who informs us that only "Bush administration defenders, right-wing bloggers and neoconservative publications are crowing about Iraqi documents newly released by the Pentagon that, they say, prove that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in league." We learn from Bergen that, "the 9/11 commission found no 'collaborative relationship' between the ultrafundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam Hussein...." Well, one of those 9/11 commissioners, former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, said recently that the documents are a "very significant set of facts" and "tie [Saddam] into a circle that meant to damage the United States." It's unclear what Republican box Bergen would put the onetime Democratic presidential candidate in. Like Prados, Bergen has invested a lot of time and effort in one particular Iraq war story line. "It's long been known that Iraqi officials were playing footsie with Al Qaeda in the mid-1990's," he writes, "but these desultory contacts never yielded any cooperation." And then there's the ubiquitous Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official who pops up in a silly and dismissive front-page piece on the documents in today's New York Times. He notes that "there's no quality control" when you just throw a bunch of documents out into the public domain. Another U.S. intelligence official is quoted anonymously as saying that "our view is there's nothing in here [the documents already released] that changes what we know today." There's no doubt that some documents may be fraudulent and that a few may wildly over interpret the meaning of some the documents. But to dismiss all of them -- leaving aside that fact the most haven't been reviewed -- is a bit rich and arrogant considering how clueless U.S. intelligence was on what was going on inside Iraq and al Qaeda. Consider these two congressional reports, the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (pp. 90, 91), and the Report on U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq (pp. 322, 323, 351, 355):

"The U.S. Intelligence Community was not able to penetrate al Qaeda's inner circle successfully before September 11, despite the fact that human penetration of that organization was considered a priority." "According to senior CTC [Counterterrorist Center] officials, CIA had no penetrations of al Qaeda's leadership and never obtained intelligence that was sufficient for action against Usama bin Laden." "CIA acknowledged the poor intelligence collection on both the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda leadership." "CIA stated it did not have specific intelligence reports that revealed Saddam Hussein's personal opinion about dealing with al Qaeda." "There was no robust HUMINT collection capability targeting Iraq's links to terrorism until the fall of 2002." "Despite four decades of intelligence reporting on Iraq, there was little useful intelligence collection that helped analysts determine the Iraqi regime's possible links to al Qaeda." "The CIA had no…sources on the ground in Iraq providing reporting specifically on terrorism."

Let's recap. The US intelligence consensus was that Saddam wouldn't invade Kuwait in 1990. They were totally unaware that Saddam was operating a " Manhattan Project"-sized nuclear weapons program until after the 1991 Gulf War. They were a bit off on the status of Saddam's wmd programs in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. Imagine if they also blew it on the extent of the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. All of the above pretty much encapsulates the current media view. Because they cannot even entertain the possibility that they may have been wrong, there isn't any new evidence that can possibly be produced. To be continued....