Dumber and Dumbererer

You'll recall my post about the guy who broke the "big story" about the stash of Saddam Hussein documents and tapes that supposedly prove causal relationships with Al Qaeda and weapons programs. You'll recall that this guy believes God directed him to weapons sites in Iraq, and that he found out about one site through a friend's dream.

Well, yesterday the right blogosphere, undaunted despite this shattered credibility, started to hype the release of some documents from the office of John Negroponte that they say were captured in postwar Afghanistan and Iran. They refuse to acknowledge their authenticity or even the accuracy of the Arabic transcripts. Maybe that's because the first "evidence" that bloggers have hyped isn't a transcript at all. Mahablog has the details:

Yesterday John Hinderaker of Power Line published a post called “In Saddam’s Archives” in which he links to and discusses one of these documents, posted on the Foreign Military Studies Office web site as “CMPC-2003-006430.” And here is that document as posted on the FMSO site [PDF].

Now here’s where it gets screwy. This document consists of a page of what looks like Arabic script (I don’t know Arabic from Parsi from whatever). This is followed by a seven-page document from the Federation of American Scientists about the Iraqi Intelligence Service, with information gleaned from various unclassified sources. This same document is still on the FAS web site, here, and was last updated in 1997, it says. Not exactly super-secret, in other words, and not from Iraq. What it contains is information floating around in the West as of 1997.

Note that Hinderaker doesn’t misrepresent this; he says plainly in his post that “The English portion of the document is a description of the Mukhabarat by the Federation of American Scientists. The Arabic portion apparently hasn’t been translated.” But then he goes on to quote the FAS document under the “In Saddam’s Archives” title, which would leave the uncareful reader with the impression that the FAS document is a translation. For all I know the Arabic portion is a laundry list.

Hinderaker even posted a correction for this. But the impression left is clear: bloggers on the right are trying to force an assumption that Saddam and Al Qaeda had a relationship based on a 9 year-old document written by Americans, based on the same old intelligence that David Kay and everyone else has flatly stated was wrong. And the FAS document is based on nonclassified sources, so it's probably not even the best source of information we had in 1997, which, if you believe these bloggers, is the kind of outdated information we should be using to make decisions about wars in 2003.

Incidentally, what do these reports actually say? Well, one claims that Zarqawi was running terrorist training camps in Iraq prior to 9/11. He was. We know this. He was doing it in Iraqi Kurdistan, above the no-fly zone, outside Saddam's control, and Saddam wanted to take him out. That's your collaborative relationship.

This is from two years ago:

Apparently, Bush had three opportunities, long before the war, to destroy a terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaida associate who recently cut off the head of Nicholas Berg. But the White House decided not to carry out the attack because, as the [NBC News] story puts it:

[T]he administration feared [that] destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

The implications of this are more shocking, in their way, than the news from Abu Ghraib. Bush promoted the invasion of Iraq as a vital battle in the war on terrorism, a continuation of our response to 9/11. Here was a chance to wipe out a high-ranking
terrorist. And Bush didn’t take advantage of it because doing so might also wipe out a rationale for invasion.

Way to take advantage of that info, John Kerry.

These documents are being dumped on the blogosphere in the hopes that they can find connections for the Administration - giving them plausible deniability when these connections are eventually debunked. If the Administration believed these would bolster their case they'd present them forcefully. Instead they sneak them out the back door to hopefully start a groundswell of unquestioning support. They can't make the case on the merits, so they let dishonest and ambitious bloggers make the case for them.

This needs to be knocked down immediately. The timing of this is clear: saber rattling on Iran has picked up, and justifying the last war will be key to winning support for this one. Only the justifications are a bunch of garbage.