Administration to Release Prewar Iraq Documents
Reuters is reporting that some 48,000 boxes of documents that were found after Baghdad fell are about to be released.
The Bush administration on Monday said it was preparing to release prewar Iraqi government material from a trove of documents and tape-recordings captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The office of U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte decided in recent days to fund a review and release process for an estimated 48,000 boxes of documents and hundreds of recorded conversations, including many involving Saddam Hussein himself, officials said. The material, removed from Iraq to Qatar, has already been reviewed by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group and continues to be scrutinized for intelligence by the U.S. military, officials said.
But officials said Negroponte’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, is expected to move quickly to release as much of the material as possible. “The ODNI is committed to expediting the review and release of the materials,” a Negroponte spokeswoman said.
The news was greeted with enthusiasm by U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who has strongly urged the administration to release the material. He suggested some of the information could shed light on prewar U.S. intelligence reports that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
The WMD allegation provided President George W. Bush with a central justification for the war in Iraq. But no such weapons have been found, and the Iraq Survey Group discovered no new evidence of WMD in its review of the prewar material. “With so many questions about prewar Iraq unanswered, I’m glad to see there is finally the sense of urgency to get this done,” Hoekstra said in a statement.
Add all those documents to the NY Times reporting this weekend that even Iraqi generals thought they had WMD’s and you can sense that facts on the ground are changing. I suspect that the NY Times’ reporting will make a big difference in how Americans perceive our going to war. That might not affect how they feel about still being at war but at least they’ll know that President Bush had good reason to believe Iraq had WMD’s.
The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes has been waiting for those documents to get released for some time now. It’ll be interesting to see what’s all found out after they’ve been translated.
Cross-post at LetFreedomRing