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FOR THE SECOND TIME IN recent weeks the Department of Defense has
denied a request from The Weekly Standard to release
unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq. These
documents apparently reveal, in some detail, activities of Saddam
Hussein's regime in the years before the war. This second denial
could also be the final one: According to two Pentagon sources, the
program designed to review, translate, and analyze data from the old
Iraqi regime may be shuttered at the end of December, not just
placing the documents beyond the reach of journalists, but also
making them inaccessible to policymakers.
As a consequence, the ongoing debate over the Iraq war and its
origins is taking place without crucial information about the former
Iraqi regime and its relationships with presumed U.S. allies and
known U.S. enemies. Despite the determined shredding and burning
efforts of regime officials in the dying days of Saddam Hussein's
government, much of this information still exists--in handwritten
documents, in videotapes and audiotapes, in photographs and
satellite images, on computer hard drives. All told, the U.S.
government has in its possession more than 2 million "exploitable"
items from the former Iraqi regime (the intelligence community's
term of art for information it thinks might be useful). According to
sources with knowledge of the project, now two and a half years old,
only 50,000 documents have been translated and fully exploited. Few
of those translated documents have been circulated to policymakers
in the Bush administration. And although one of the translated
documents was leaked to the New York Times last summer, none
of the others has been released, formally or informally.
The result: Much of today's debate about the threat posed three
years ago by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is based on past assessments by
U.S. intelligence agencies that we now know had no real sources on
the ground in Iraq. The Bush administration seems remarkably
uninterested in discovering, now that we have reams of material from
Saddam's regime, what the actual terror-related and WMD-related
activities of that regime were. But as the political debate of
recent weeks makes clear, answering these questions remains central
to the debate over the war. More important, it cannot be the case
that there's nothing helpful to the ongoing war on terror in these
files.
Beginning in February 2005, I started asking the Pentagon's
public affairs office for more information on the document
exploitation (DOCEX) project headquartered in Doha, Qatar. Later in
the spring, I provided to the Pentagon a list of more than 40
unclassified Iraqi regime documents and requested that they be
released. Pentagon public affairs officials denied this request and
indicated that a Freedom of Information Act request would likely be
the only way to secure the documents, even though they were not
classified. I filed a FOIA request on June 19. The FOIA request was
passed from the Pentagon to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to
the Army's Intelligence and Security Command. I received an
"administrative denial" of my request on September 20.
One of the reasons I was given to explain the delays: "There are
hundreds of thousands of other documents in the system, and it is a
labor intensive process to find specific documents." That is
nonsense, according to two intelligence sources with extensive
background in the document exploitation project. The databases are
keyword searchable.
Still, in an effort to make the searches easier, I provided the
Pentagon with a new, more specific request for documents on November
21. The new request included document titles, short descriptions,
dates, and even document numbers. This information came from a list
I obtained with short summaries of a number of the documents in
Doha. It bears noting that some of the documents described in the
list have been flagged as potentially inauthentic. However, none of
the documents I requested from the Pentagon was so flagged, and one
analyst familiar with the document exploitation project said the
government believes that at least 80 percent of the documents that
have been processed are authentic.
Some of the documents that made up my most recent request sound
unexceptional:
Title: Location of Weapons/Ammunition Storage with
Map
Short Description: Letter saying that compound wall
needs to be built higher so that new houses being built won't be
able to look over into secret military base.
Agency:
DIA
Document Date: May-01
Document #:
CMPC-2003-000788
Title: IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] Request to
move Persons, Prisoners, and VIPs to Private Residences
Short Description: Preparations for attack. Preparations to
move docs to private residences of agency workers.
Agency:
DIA
Document Date: Dec-02
Document #:
IZSP-2003-00300934
The descriptions of other documents are more provocative:
Title: Intelligence coded memo by two IIS
officers containing info on various topics; weapons boat,
Palestinians training in Iraq, etc.
Short Description:
Lists Palestinians trained in Iraq, etc.
Agency: DIA
Document Date: Mar-02
Document #:
IISP-2003-00038100
Title: Presidential instruction from Hussein concerning mass
graves in southern Iraq, and how to handle the PR/media fallout.
Short Description: Concerning mass graves found in the
south: Check for nuclear radiation, identify bodies, ensure that
CNN is the first news agency onsite. Any funerals should have an
international impact. Signed by Hussein.
Agency: DIA
Document Date: Feb-01
Document #:
ISGZ-2004-00224003
Presumably, this was a plan to blame any mass graves on deaths
supposedly caused by depleted-uranium artillery shells used by U.S.
forces in the first Gulf War--a favorite talking point of the
pro-Saddam left in the 1990s.
Other document descriptions raise more questions than they
answer:
Title: Chemical, Biological Agent Destruction
Short Description: See Document for Remarks.
Agency: DIA
Document Date: Feb-03
Document #: BIAP-2003-004427
Title: IIS Correspondence for the Iraq Embassy in the
Philippines and Iraqi MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs].
Short Description: Various correspondence e.g. visa
forms, trade delegations, full reports on the connections between
Abu Sayaf and the Qadafi Charity Establishment. Report on a
certain individual traveling to Pakistan and involvements with bin
Laden.
Agency: DIA
Document Date: Mar-01
Document #: ISGP-2003-00014100
Were biological and chemical agents destroyed by the Iraqi
regime? When? How? How many? Does the correspondence between the
Iraqi Embassy in Manila and the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs
shed any new light on the $25 million ransom that Muammar Qaddafi
paid Abu Sayyaf in the summer of 2000, ostensibly to secure the
release of 25 Westerners held hostage by the Filipino al Qaeda
affiliate? Who traveled to Pakistan? What was his involvement with
bin Laden? Did he have anything to do with the Iraqi government?
One would think the U.S. government would want answers to
questions like these. But the DIA has been angling since last spring
to close the DOCEX program in Doha. According to two Pentagon
sources with direct knowledge of the issue, the future of that DOCEX
program has been the subject of intense debate in recent
weeks. Analysts with knowledge of the project say that the work is
not close to being completed and warn that the closure of the DOCEX
project there could mean the premature end to an important
effort.
Although there are other facilities doing similar work in Baghdad
and suburban Washington, the effort in Qatar is the most robust,
with approximately 700 translators working in three shifts to review
materials. (In a November 21 article in these pages--"Where Are the
Pentagon Papers?"--I mistakenly reported that the Qatar effort
employed some 200 translators. In fact, there are three shifts, each
using 200-plus translators.)
Asked whether the program is on the verge of elimination, a
spokesman for the DIA says that the Qatar DOCEX program is like any
other program, in that it is subject to annual reviews and may
always be defunded from one year to the next.
If anything, given the stakes in Iraq and the potential trove of
useful information captured in postwar Iraq, one might expect the
Bush administration to allocate additional resources to these
document exploitation efforts. Instead they are about to be closed
down. Why?
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
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