HT Ashbrook E-Mail Update -
Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs

The Times

It's three years since the disarmament of Saddam and all that followed . . .
Gerard Baker
[Timesonline UK]

IN MARCH 2003 Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, of the UN, secured a remarkable, last-minute deal that averted war and seemed to guarantee the disarmament of Iraq. “Saddam Hussein has finally consented to eliminate all his weapons of mass destruction,” they said, in a signing ceremony with the Iraqi leader.

Saddam, flanked by his two sons, Uday and Qusay, accepted the plaudits of the UN with pomp and grace. Beaming as he smiled at a hastily assembled crowd of French, German and Russian children, he said he had saved the world from the bloodlust of George Bush and Tony Blair with a magnanimous gesture of international friendship. There were approving murmurs of support in many Western capitals. In Oslo there was talk of a Nobel Peace prize.

*
To enforce the deal and ensure compliance, of course the US and Britain were required to remain on a war footing, with almost 250,000 troops in the neighbouring Arab countries. Over the following months Arab terrorist groups demanded the expulsion of infidels from Muslim lands and a series of attacks sapped the morale of allied servicemen and women. Steadily, over the next few months public support in the allied countries ebbed away.

Within months of the avoided showdown, the UN gave Iraq a clean bill of health — there were no stockpiles of weapons at all, it said. The US and the UK were sceptical, insisted that Iraq retained the capability to produce weapons quickly — the real test, they said, of the scale of the threat — and pressed to keep sanctions in place. But it was a losing cause.

[...]

Read More

HT The Conservative Voice

WHAT THE CAPTURED DOCUMENTS SHOW
by Mona Charen
March 23, 2006 10:38 PM EST

President Bush has made errors, as all humans do, but one thing he has not been guilty of is bad faith. The same cannot be said of his critics.

One thinks of those liberals and Democrats who accused President Bush of "lying" about weapons of mass destruction and about ties between al Qaeda and Iraq particularly now, because last week, after an unaccountable delay of three years, the administration declassified and released thousands of documents captured from Saddam's regime. They offer more proof of what we've already learned from other sources: that Hussein was in collusion with al Qaeda; that he did instruct his people on hiding evidence of WMDs; and that he did support worldwide terror.

[...]

Oh yes, the documents. One shows that an official from Iraq's government met with Osama bin Laden on Feb. 19, 1995, with the explicit permission of Saddam Hussein. When bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan, the Iraqi documents contain a handwritten note saying, "The relationship with him is still through the Sudanese. We're currently working on activating this relationship through a new channel in light of his current location" (Afghanistan). The notes also reveal that Osama bin Laden suggested "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia.

The documents further disclose that the Iraqi intelligence service issued detailed instructions to directors and managers of weapons sites regarding UN inspections. They were to remove files from computers, "remove correspondence with the atomic energy and military industry departments concerning the prohibited weapons" and "remove prohibited materials and equipment, including documents and catalogs and making sure to clear labs and storages (sic) of any traces of chemical or biological materials that were previously used or stored . . ."

Read More

HT Dr. Zin - Regime Change Iran

Here's some interesting news from Dr. Zin:

www.regimechangeiran.com

Also see his daily summary:

http://regimechangeiran.blogspot.com/2006/03/thursdays-daily-briefing-on-iran_22.html


RBT

*****

IAEA: Iran's Nuclear Program More Advanced Than Previously Thought

BREAKING NEWS:

Vital Perspective's sources inform us that the IAEA is urgently warning of the need to reassess the timeline on Iran's nuclear program in light of the following:

1. Iran has assembled and is possibly already operating the 164-centrifuge cascade

2. Iran has moved canisters of UF6 to the cascade site

3. Iran has indicated its intention to operate the cascade over a two-to-three week period, and if successful, to move towards assembly of a 3,000 centrifuge unit.

As we have said before, 3,000 centrifuges could produce enough highly-enriched uranium for a bomb. The IAEA also expressed alarm over Iran's technological capabilities, which are more developed then previously assumed, and its willingness to skip phases in the enrichment process.

Unfortunately, as we have been reporting, the pace of diplomacy is not keeping up with Iran's accelerated drive, as the Russians (and Chinese) continue stalling despite repeated attempts by the U.S., Britain and France to soften the Security Council proposals in an effort to reach consensus.

Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said Wednesday that American threats are no more than propaganda, and that a U.S. military attack is not likely, especially in view of U.S. requests for Iran's assistance in solving the crisis in Iraq. He also expressed confidence that the Security Council will fail to reach agreement on sanctions. This statement is particularly significant in view of the buzz in Washington regarding a U.S. dialogue with Iran. Mottaki leaves little doubt that Tehran sees U.S. calls for dialogue as a sign of weakness.

[...]

*****

Iranians in fear of fear

Nir Boms and Reza Bulorchi, Washington Times:

Following two decades of Tehran's lies and three years of international wishful thinking, Iran's nuclear case was finally brought to the hands of the U.N. Security Council. In the meantime the mullahcracy in Tehran has been gearing itself for another phase of international standoff.

On the same day Tehran declared "the Russian proposal is no longer on our agenda." the Sunday Telegraph reported that Iran has built a secret underground emergency command center in north Tehran as "they prepare for a confrontation with the West over their illicit nuclear program."

Hojatol-Islam Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultraconservative Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, was reported in February to have approved the use of atomic weapons against the "enemies of Islam." Meanwhile, the theocratic regime's shrinking loyal base is mobilized for staged rallies in front of European embassies and nuclear facilities to give an appearance of national legitimacy.

The mullahs' nuclear drive has no doubt enraged Iranians -- but for reasons far different from what the mullahs may admit.

For years, the mullahs have proven to be the biggest enemy of Iranians. The regime carried out summary executions of thousands of political prisoners in what is known as the 1988 massacre that followed a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini. Even pregnant prisoners were not spared. Last year, Mohammad Abbaspour, a member of the social committee of Iranian parliament, said "Today 90 percent of people are under the poverty line". The foreign debt has reached almost 30 percent of Iran's GDP. Thousands of Iranians have sold their kidneys to make the ends meet. Some families have even traded their young daughters to human traffickers. Iran's massive flux of rising oil income has only helped to finance a gigantic multi-faceted WMD program and a growing infrastructure of terror around the Middle East.

Indeed, the vast majority of Iranians are opposed to the theocratic regime's drive that has pushed their country to the verge of a military confrontation. An internal classified report prepared by a state-run polling center has reportedly concluded that only 31 percent of Iranians consider the nuclear program a "national' project. The report adds that 86 percent of Iranians believe the nuclear energy is not worth entering a war.

[...]

*****

Russia’s Double Game

Kenneth R. Timmerman, FrontPageMagazine.com:

The talks at the United Nations over Iran’s nuclear weapons program have stalled, and the culprit is clear: the Russian government of ex-KGB officer Vladmir Putin.

Russia has chosen to help the Islamic Republic of Iran buy more time to complete its nuclear weapons programs, turning down repeated U.S. and European offers to soften a UN Security Council statement during yet another round of negotiations in New York on Wednesday.

“Why anybody in Moscow thinks it's in their interest to have a nuclear-capable ballistic missile-equipped Iran near their southern border is a mystery to me,” U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said last week.

And yet, that’s precisely what the Russians are doing

[...]

*****

House Appropriations Committee of the US Congress: Press Release

Promotion of Democracy in Iran — The committee did not fund the $75 million requested by the Administration for the promotion of democracy in Iran because it was poorly justified. Instead, $56 million was provided through proven, existing programs that will have an immediate, positive impact on the fostering of democratic ideals in Iran.

We are concerned about the status of the Senate Bill 333. There appears to be no movement on the bill. Call your Senators and ask them to support the bill. We need action on it soon.

House Appropriations Committee of the US Congress: Press Release

Promotion of Democracy in Iran — The committee did not fund the $75 million requested by the Administration for the promotion of democracy in Iran because it was poorly justified. Instead, $56 million was provided through proven, existing programs that will have an immediate, positive impact on the fostering of democratic ideals in Iran.

We are concerned about the status of the Senate Bill 333. There appears to be no movement on the bill. Call your Senators and ask them to support the bill. We need action on it soon.

[...]

HT JunkYardBlog

JunkYardBlog has an excellent piece on why the UN Security Council was co-opted by Saddam's Oil for Food scam. To some degree this is happening again with Iran. The players are the same (Russia and China) with the exception of France that apparently is getting cold feet.

RBT is posting the entire piece here. Hopefully JunkYardBlog will be understanding.

RBT

*****

ABC News Buries the Lead

Yes, it’s important that the Russian ambassador apparently had sources at US Centcom in 2003, and that he was able to use those sources to gather up detailed information on the US forces that were about to pounce on Iraq. And it’s significant that he apparently told the Iraqis all about our force composition and battle plan. All of that is very significant, even if it didn’t help Saddam very much to know that the force coming against him was more than his best troops could handle on their best day. We need to find out who those Centcom sources were, by the way. They need to spend some quality time in Leavenworth.

But it’s also significant that this Russian ambassador, Vladimir Teterenko, was on Saddam’s Oil-For-Food speed dial while all of this was going on. Here’s the Editor’s Note attached to the ABC News story about the Russian’s perfidy:

The Russian ambassador in March 2003 was Vladimir Teterenko. Teterenko appears in documents released by the Volker Commission, which investigated the Oil for Food scandal, as receiving allocations of 3 million barrels of oil — worth roughly $1.5 million.

Here’s the significance: Saddam knew, based on the Russian’s word, that his troops would get crushed if the US and Coalition forces actually invaded. But Saddam had at least some reason to think he could avoid the invasion because he had back door influence with the Russians, the French and the UN through oil kickbacks in the Oil-For-Food swindle. Oil-For-Food is one story that the MSM has not wanted to touch with a ten-foot pole, but it is central to understanding some of Saddam’s pre-war behavior. Here it is, having an impact on the eve of the war in Iraq. Saddam knew he rented if not owned outright dozens of officials like Teterenko. That corruption, which went right up to Kofi Annan’s son and spread all around the globe, was Saddam’s insurance policy against having to face a united world. He knew that his petrodollars effectively divided the West. He counted, mostly correctly, on that division stifling any serious action against him in the UN, but he counted incorrectly that the UN’s intransigence would stop the US. If nothing else, that should tell you that the US was one of the few countries Saddam had not bought off through Oil-For-Food corruption.

It should also tell you that people like Teterenko may have gotten rich off OFF kickbacks—but their money was covered in blood.

HT In the Bullpen

Saddam Approved Meeting with OBL in 1995
Filed under: Terrorism by Chad Evans at 1:21 pm EST

There’s nothing to see here. Move on.

“Osama Bin Laden Contact With Iraq”

A newly released pre-war Iraqi document indicates that an official representative of Saddam Hussein’s government met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan on February 19, 1995 after approval by Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden asked that Iraq broadcast the lectures of Suleiman al Ouda, a radical Saudi preacher, and suggested “carrying out joint operations against foreign forces” in Saudi Arabia. According to the document, Saddam’s presidency was informed of the details of the meeting on March 4, 1995 and Saddam agreed to dedicate a program for them on the radio. The document states that further “development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what’s open (in the future) based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation.” The Sudanese were informed about the agreement to dedicate the program on the radio.

But, but, but . . . the 9/11 Commission report stated there was no collaborative relationship. Was their job to decipher whether or not Iraq and Al Qaida were connected or to find out what happened, why it happened and how 9/11 could be prevented? This is just Rovian propoganda to point out any connections Iraq had with Al Qaida. Or so we will be told.

Read it All

HT American Chronicle

Saddam General: Newsweek Translation of Saddam Tapes Wrong
Jim Kouri, CPP March 23, 2006


Former Iraqi Air Force Gen. Georges Sada claims that Newsweek's translation of some of Saddam Hussein's tapes is wrong. Newsweek reported that the Saddam tapes include statements that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Irag.

General Sada says that the tapes were not translated correctly and his translation is that Saddam Hussein did have WMD. Why would Newsweek publish an erroneous story? Sada believes they used unqualified translators who confused Arab dialects. Others believe Newsweek may have a vested interest in perpetuating the story that Iraq had no WMD.

General Sada also says that chemical or biological weapons were flown to Syria in 56 flights, but was unable to confirm it.

General Sada's allegations are confirmed by others. A Pentagon official, John A. Shaw, who was responsible for keeping track of Iraq?s weapons programs, claims that special Russian troops in civilian clothes supervised the transfer of Saddam?s WMDs into Syria. An Israeli general, Moshe Yaalon, has made a similar claim. The general in charge of Pentagon spy satellites has admitted observing large truck convoys from Iraq to Syria before the war began.

[...]

Read it All

HT TCS Daily


Better Right Than Never
By Harold Hutchison : BIO| 23 Mar 2006


It is almost an article of faith among the mainstream media and many opponents of the liberation of Iraq that Saddam Hussein's regime had no connection to terrorism. This is one of the prime assertions that underpins the anti-war movement's protests against the liberation of Iraq.

The problem with the anti-war movement's position, in this case, is that they know something that just ain't so -- and they are now being contradicted by the memos from Saddam Hussein's own intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.

The first of these memos to emerge came in April, 2003, when Toronto Star reporter Mitch Potter discovered a memo in the bombed-out wreckage of Mukhabarat headquarters. The memo discussed bringing an envoy from Osama bin Laden to Baghdad for the purpose of "discussing the future of our relationship with him." Unlike the hotly-debated reports of Mohammed Atta meeting Mukhabarat officer Ahmed al-Ani in Prague in April, 2000, this was something that was not relying on eyewitness identification. This was Saddam's own intelligence service saying they wanted to chat with an envoy from Osama bin Laden.

However, this memo was quickly obscured by the failure to immediately find the weapons of mass destruction and by the beginnings of the Valerie Plame controversy. And soon, the memo was lost and forgotten in the minds of the mainstream media.

[...]

Read it All

HT Exit Zero

Tony Blair explains it all..

This terrorism will not be defeated until its ideas, the poison that warps the minds of its adherents, are confronted, head-on, in their essence, at their core. By this I don't mean telling them terrorism is wrong. I mean telling them their attitude to America is absurd; their concept of governance pre-feudal; their positions on women and other faiths, reactionary and regressive; and then since only by Muslims can this be done: standing up for and supporting those within Islam who will tell them all of this but more, namely that the extremist view of Islam is not just theologically backward but completely contrary to the spirit and teaching of the Koran...

[...]

Which brings me to the fundamental point. "We" is not the West. "We" are as much Muslim as Christian or Jew or Hindu. "We" are those who believe in religious tolerance, openness to others, to democracy, liberty and human rights administered by secular courts.

This is not a clash between civilisations. It is a clash about civilisation. It is the age-old battle between progress and reaction, between those who embrace and see opportunity in the modern world and those who reject its existence; between optimism and hope on the one hand; and pessimism and fear on the other...

Read it All

HT Dan Darling (Winds of Change) via The Weekly Standard

Now that the Blogos has access to the Saddam Regime's docs and tapes, more info re this regime's barbarity is coming to light. Dan Darling has been pouring over these newly released docs. He has these important relevations in this new article at The Weekly Standard. As RBT has said the barbaric Saddam Regime had the same penchent for meticulous record keeping as the brutal Third Reich did before them.

The LL and the MSM are still too entrenched with the WMD meme, "Bush Lied, People Died," and the Iraqi "Civil War" to report on Saddam's atrocities. I guess neo-Hitlers get a free ride on genocide from the MSM editors. The day of reckoning for the LL and the MSM will come soon enough. The Blogos will out them for the blind and naive idealists that they are.

The Saddam Regime's docs are akin to the Ark of the Covenant in the movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, that was last seen languishing in a cavernous governmental warehouse. Times are changing and the LL and the MSM are no longer the sole providers of info and news of the day. The Blogos is surpasing the MSM as the provider of objective, timely, and predictive news that has relevance in our daily lives.

The Blogos is now coming online to crunch away on these docs. The Blogos is an intelligent distributive computer network with parallel processing power far greater than all the Crays combined (super computers). This collective network is, An Army of Davids, as envisioned by Glenn Reynolds in his new book by the same name.

Similarly as Hugh Hewitt writes, we are in information transformation period as great or greater than that of Martin Luther's time with the advent of the printing press in his book, Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World. Lurther's time was when the control of information and the news of the day was wrested away from the elitist aristocracy and the Catholic Church. The citizens of that day now had access to the original source material. They could read firsthand, interpret, and decide what the truth was or not. So informed they chould pose challenging questions to those in power.

Pajama Media has taken on the chore of warehousing the findings of the Blogos. See posts there by Roy Robinson a frequent contributor to The American Thinker, John Hinderaker of Powerline, Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard [ed note: Has been on this story from the beginning], Omar of Iraq the Model, and other direct translations. See PJ Iraq Files

See this previous post from Tennyson on the importance of winning the War of Information, GWOT - A Tale of Two Wars [A Must Read!] at Red State. Also see this excellent analysis re the role of the MSM and the Blogs in the GWOT at The Adventures of Chester

UPDATE: Roger L. Simon reports the release of more documents. John Hinderaker of Powerline is calling for more translators.

RBT

*****

Republic of Fear
Newly-released documents show Saddam's regime lived up to reputation.

by Dan Darling
03/21/2006 8:00:00 AM


WHEN THE IRAQI REGIME collapsed in April 2003, few observers saw reason to mourn the loss of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. While a great deal of information about the former Iraqi regime's assorted atrocities has been uncovered since the invasion, newly-released documents go even further in demonstrating its manifest depravity.

One such document is CMPC-2003-012666 [Ed note: This link is currently broken], a letter from Qusay Hussein that directs as follows:

Transfer all Kuwaiti POW's / a total of 448 captured Kuwaitis who are located at the Al-Nida Al-Agher Prison and the Intelligence / General Center and Kazema Prison in Al-Kazema, to make them human shields at all locations that are expected to be attacked by the American aggressors. Put them in communication locations and essential ministries, radio and television, Military Industrial Commissions, and all other locations expected to be attacked by the criminal Anglo-American aggressors.

In addition to the barbarity of using prisoners as human shields, it should be noted that these documents constitute a clear refutation of the official position of the Iraqi government, which claimed from 1996 onwards that while it had taken 126 Kuwaitis prisoner during the Gulf War, they were no longer in Iraqi custody. Clearly, the Iraqi regime had no intention of releasing all of its Gulf War prisoners under any circumstances, but rather chose to retain them for the apparent purpose of creating the appearance of civilian casualties for propaganda purposes during the U.S. bombing campaign.

In a similar vein is CMPC-2004-002219-0, which lays out a series of memos between Saddam's office, Iraqi military intelligence, and the Iraqi army in order to draw up plans to attack Kurdish guerrilla bases. As these memos make clear, international treaties banning the use of chemical weapons (referred to throughout the memos with the euphemism "special equipment") were of little interest to Saddam Hussein:

Read it All

[Ed note: Special equipment is a euphemism for chem/bio weapons that was confirmed in Gen. Sada's book, Saddam's Secrets]

Update:

Dr. Sanity has a related post on the Blogos and the MSM.

HT Tennyson at Red State via Terrorism Unveiled

A MUST READ!

RBT

*****

A Tale of Two Wars
By: Tennyson · Section: Diaries

Promoted from Diaries by Thomas

In the past week, two major offensives in the Global War on Terror were planned and have begun to be unfold. The first, heralded and then denigrated in the press is Operation Swarmer. I'll leave analysis of that effort as merited to more qualified parties like streiff and Matt Wretchard.

The second, and ultimately far more important offensive, is Operation "Pusillanimy." This daring Democratic campaign is meant to use key American strengths - unified support for first responders, respect for veterans, and free assemblies to directly and substantially undercut the morale for the ongoing operations in Iraq for the purpose of increasing their political traction before the 2006 elections. Make no mistake, it is not the fighting on the ground in Iraq, near the Punjab border in Afghanistan, or the positioning going on around Iran and Syria that will determine the outcome of the Global War on Terror. Despite the difficulties and challenges they represent, the American Allies and the Coalition of the "Still" Willing are more than sufficient to deal with all of those threats. The War Abroad - the first war - will be won if it is fully joined.

It is the second war, the "War At Home", that represents the Great Battle of Our Time. I lament that it is so. In some ways, I wake up every morning wondering how it could have gotten this far and how it all went so wrong. I wonder how so many Americans could accept, even cheer, American defeat and ignore the resultant slaughter of innocents by those we fight just to achieve their own myopic political victory. Whatever the reason and purpose of Providence, things are as they are.

Three years into the Iraq Campaign and four and half years into the GWOT, the fortitude of the home front "stands on the edge of a knife." "Stray but a little and it will fail, to the ruin of all." And those that would not have their children grow up in a world where an Islamist scimitar of Damocles hangs by a thread above their futures have to set aside our idealistic indulgence and fight to win. The War at Home is an Information War and we have no choice but victory.

Below the fold is an uncompromising strategy for that victory...

The success of the Left's War at Home is based on Three Essential Theses:

1. President Bush Lied about WMD being in Iraq to lead us into an unnecessary and immoral war

2. Iraq had no ties to Al Qaeda before the Iraq War

3. President Bush has manipulated the post 9/11 security concerns to create an Imperial Presidency that runs roughshod over the rights of Americans

I will call these the Three Big Lies. They are specific theses and subspecies of the Bush Lied meme. All three of these are debunked below:

[...]

At this point, it should be apparent that this war can only be lost by a failure of the political rear guard to overcome the lies that have sapped the will of the American people to keep supporting the fight. I'm not even going to talk about the will of the American people to "keep fighting." If there is one great fault of Bush's leadership after 9/11 it is perhaps that the American people were never compelled to sacrifice sufficiently to provide for this war to its end. The competing interests of a "return to normalcy" while at the same time letting a small portion of our population bear the brunt of the sacrifice is a classic example of trying to have your cake and eat it to. Because of the appearance of normalcy now, it is all too seductive to believe the profestations of the good looking, wealthy, self-absorbed, and maliciously ignorant or the never ending misinforming drum beat of the MSM (links omitted due to lack of time to select winners from too many competing examples).

[...]

ts long past time to treat our current predicament with the seriousness of being at war and not the almost tongue and cheek backslapping and snarkiness of conventional politics. When members of the Left (or the Right) lie about vital issues of National Security to achieve short term political advantage, they should be vilified and ostracized with unrelenting vigor. If they whine about questioning of their patriotism , the question should be turned around on them. Does a patriot lie about their military, compare them to mass murderers, and refuse to support them while in combat to better position themselves for personal political gains? If they do not recant or cave when their argument is unmasked as a pack of lies, then their patriotism, their honesty, and their goodness should not only be questioned, it should be doubted and discounted. It is no crime to disagree, but it is a dangerous incapacity of moral fiber to base those disagreements on the Three Big Lies.

[...]

Even with the heavy heart this discussion naturally creates, take heart! The War at Home is far from decided. The major confrontation is now upon us. While the entire political apparatus of the Democratic Party and the MSM may have united with singular determination to see their fiction received and ratified as truth. We are not disadvantaged in that we actually have the truth on our side. In addition, we have the prospect of vindication close at hand both in word and deed. What we are lacking at present is both the resolve to get to war footing in the Information War at Home and the willingness to relentlessly loose an Army of Persuaders and an Army of Shamers.

[...]

READ IT ALL!
[Rich with hotlinks]

HT Athena - Terrorism Unveiled

Athena weighs in on the release of Saddam's docs and Guantanamo Bay transcripts of detainee interrogations.

OK Bloggers here's your chance to connect the dots.

RBT

*****

DOCEX goes public on a grand scale

Recently, the public has been tossed a gem of what was previously unavailable open-source: Guantanamo Bay transcripts of detainee interrogations. There is an all-out organized effort to sift through these transcripts (some sets which are very lengthy), and write-up nuggets of information found within them. See GroupIntel for more. Thus far, Dan Darling has done a relentless job at reviewing them.

These little nuggets can help us better understand the capabilities, planning, mindset of terrorists and sympathizers, and operations. Certainly this is a good thing, with so many people pouring over the documents who undoubtedly come from different backgrounds, a sort of "group-think" that permeates government agencies will be kept at bay.

Although, there's no doubt that some public "exploiters" are simply looking for "I told you so" information. It's my hope that speculation abounds, but claims are kept to a minimum--and backed by what's evidential within the information given.

Soon to be released are the plethora of Iraqi documents, reportedly the boxes of documents exceed 40,000. Nothing can replace human eyes going over these documents, and more than that, those who have background knowledge concerning the Middle East. And yes of course, then we can get into a debate of "who knows best."

But, herein lies the problem. Experienced analysts are needed, yet ones who haven't been stymied into accepting and spouting the typical intel community line. What's needed are analysts who can offer solid assessments based on the data. And from that, offer predictions that, inherently, cannot be within the data.

I really don't know where the line is drawn on this. I believe any well-read individual can help pour through information, but I become apprehensive when I think of a dearth of background knowledge on Mideast Affairs, Iraq, etc. Yet, those analysts who supposedly have such knowledge are simply limited, tow Agency lines (whether they like it or not), or maybe aren't all that knowledgeable in the first place. Independent contractors, then...perhaps? And then, it just becomes a never-ending circle, since these workers are recycled from government jobs.

So, bloggers, have at it. Just don't forget that your findings aren't meant to support your opinion on the war, but the war itself.


Update:

Iraqi documents may be released to this site
Afghanistan documents here (and a March 17 addition from the previously released Harmony documents)

Update 2:

Michael Tanji's latest post:

So is this a Rovian plot to use right-wing blogs to spread disinfo, or a case where the other camp can’t be bothered to look? This info is going public, not to the Kristol house and then public. There is nothing stopping those of any political bent from doing their own work and drawing their own conclusions.

Picking nits might make entertaining fodder for either “base” but it isn’t particularly constructive. We are all about to be dropped into the middle of a nearly impenetrable forest and instead of figuring out how we’re going to get out; we argue about whether the forest is primarily deciduous or evergreen.

Wretchard weighs in.

Posted by Athena at 12:54 PM

Read it All
[Athena has hotlinks to other sits in her post]

Saddam’s Tapes, WMDs and the Osama Connection
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 20, 2006

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, the co-author with Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely on their book Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror. He is a retired Air Force Fighter Pilot who has been a Fox News Military Analyst for the last four and a half years and continues to appear regularly on Fox. He just returned from his second visit to Iraq in December, 2005.

[...]

FP: The released audiotapes of Saddam Hussein's conversations with his key officials are turning up more and more evidence of WMDs and the Osama connection. The documents released by the U.S. government last Wednesday, for instance, reveal more about the Saddam-Al Qaeda link. Can you shed some light on this for us?

McInereny: I just reviewed this additional release of documents. This release continues to confirm that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda were in contact with Iraq intelligence for sanctuary, training, and plans for acts of terrorism against the US and in the US.

This just supports the 12 hours of tapes we heard of Saddam Hussein’s that discussed using proxies (Al Qaeda) to attack the US with WMD i.e. nuclear or biological. The latest release has pictures of Zarqawi while he was in Iraq prior to our liberation. It is obvious that he was living there as a sanctuary after he left Afghanistan. Stephen

Hayes of the Weekly Standard has done a superb job in describing this relationship in great detail in several articles and TV appearances on Fox News. In addition the CIA director George Tenet confirmed this prior to the liberation of Iraq as did Under Secretary Doug Feith in a memo on Al Qaeda’s involvement with Iraq prior to hostilities. However some people are still in denial even with the latest release as it gets in the way of their agenda.

FP: It appears that many people also remain in denial about the WMD issue. The released audiotapes reveal Saddam Hussein and his key officials discussing their WMD programs from the mid-1990s onwards, correct?

McInerney: Yes, Jamie. It was a fascinating experience to see the transcripts of Saddam’s conversations. He discussed hiding WMDs from the UN inspectors and knowing where the inspectors were going to go in advance. He discussed their efforts to develop Plasma Enrichment for nuclear weapons totally unknown to the UN inspectors.

But the most telling to me was the conversation between Tariq Aziz his foreign minister and Saddam in which they discussed having proxies implant nuclear and biological weapons in US cities. They concluded that Iraq would be blamed for an explosion but not biological as they could use deception and blame US facility ( Ft Dietrick) which makes me conclude that Iraq was responsible for the anthrax attack in US less than 30 days after 9/11.

The FBI has not determined who did it although they tried to charge unsuccessfully a former Ft Dietrick employee. It is obvious that we should aggressively be translating the remaining 3,000 hours of tapes!

FP: So the evidence appears to suggest the Russians moved the WMD’s out of Iraq, correct?

McInerney: Yes -- to three locations in Syria and one in Lebanon (Beka Valley) in the Sept – Dec 2002 time frame. This information was provided by Jack Shaw, the former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for international technology security. He charged that Saddam’s stockpiles of WMDs were moved by a Russian Spetznatz team headed by Yevgeny Primakov, the former Russian Intelligence Chief, who came to Iraq in December 2002 to supervise the final cleanup.

Mr. Shaw found this out through a meeting in London with the head of MI–6 (UK CIA), the Ukrainian Intelligence Chief and others in the summer of 2003. The Ukrainians were very close and supportive of the Russians at that time.

[...]

Read it All

HT PJ Media

PJ Media has started a special section for the Iraqi documents - PJ Iraq Files. "This blog will be a repository for those translations and for commentary in various forms (text, audio and video) on them and on the already translated documents."

RBT

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Eureka, I think

John Hinderaker, Powerline

March 19, 2006 8:23 PM

There has been a lot of excitement about the documents and tapes that were captured in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are now being made available for review and, in some instances, translation. The first batch contained some very interesting items, but nothing, in my opinion, that was new, important and reliable. With one exception: An eight-page document in English, printed off the web site of the Federation of American Scientists, with a cover page and notes in Arabic. As we pointed out here, the contents of the FAS analysis of Iraq’s intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, are extremely interesting; the question is, are they accurate?

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HT Dr. Zin - Regime Change Iran

Regime-run newspaper admits to the destruction of 90 banks and death of 9 regime guards


Iran Press News: Translation by Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi.

Despite a flurry of reports from various regime-run news sources that originally stated that Chaharshanbeh Souri celebrants stormed 9 banks on Tuesday night, March 14th, the correct news was exposed by KAYHAN, the mouthpiece newspaper belonging to the Fuehrer Mullah Khamnei. In it's Thursday issue Kayhan quotes, Commander Talaii, the head of Tehran's disciplinary forces in saying that the correct number of banks that were stormed were in fact 90.

This newspaper also reported that 9 of the regimes guards were killed in the confrontation with the people, 122 guards were injured by celebrants of which 85 were treated on the spot by emergency workers. The remaining 37 guards were transfered to hospitals. READ MORE

KAYHAN offensively called the frustrated and blameless celebrants, agitators and thugs and reported on the arrests of 306 in the province of Fars, 36 in Marogheh, 174 in Tehran, 70 in Hamadan, 367 in Semnan; each of the detainees were charged with possessing firecrackers and sparklers.

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HT PipeLineNews.Org


Harmony Documents Provide Historical Perspective For War On Terror

March 20, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - As the government moves to declassify and in some instances translate the hundreds of thousands of documents [code named the Harmony database] that have been discovered as a result of Coalition actions taken in the Iraqi and Afghani theaters of the war on terror they are being selectively released.

One of the locations that is involved in this project is the Combat Terrorism Center at West Point. The below link contains foundational documents relating to al-Qaeda, bin-Laden and Zawahiri sourced through the CTC at West Point - Link

The majority of the documents so far released pertaining to Iraq available at Here. This information is being processed by the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office. It consists mainly of media captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Though many of the documents have yet to be translated, a sampling of those that have are located below:

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