Negroponte and the Saddam Files

An oft-repeated Dem talking point is that the Bush Administration is shrouded in secrecy.

When it comes to the Saddam Files, Bush doesn't want to keep any secrets.

For weeks, months now, President Bush has been pushing for the release of tapes and documents that were captured after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. He wants the information made available to the public, but John Negroponte continues to fight its release.

In an article for the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes writes:

On February 16, President George W. Bush assembled a small group of congressional Republicans for a briefing on Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley were there, and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad participated via teleconference from Baghdad. As the meeting was beginning, Mike Pence spoke up. The Indiana Republican, a leader of conservatives in the House, was seated next to Bush.

"Yesterday, Mr. President, the war had its best night on the network news since the war ended," Pence said.

"Is this the tapes thing?" Bush asked, referring to two ABC News reports that included excerpts of recordings Saddam Hussein made of meetings with his war cabinet in the years before the U.S. invasion. Bush had not seen the newscasts but had been briefed on them.

Pence framed his response as a question, quoting Abraham Lincoln: "One of your Republican predecessors said, 'Give the people the facts and the Republic will be saved.' There are 3,000 hours of Saddam tapes and millions of pages of other documents that we captured after the war. When will the American public get to see this information?"

Bush replied that he wanted the documents released. He turned to Hadley and asked for an update. Hadley explained that John Negroponte, Bush's Director of National Intelligence, "owns the documents" and that DNI lawyers were deciding how they might be handled.

...Bush told Hadley to expedite the release of the Iraq documents. "This stuff ought to be out. Put this stuff out."

On February 15, 2006, ABC's Brian Ross had an exclusive report on "Saddam's Secret Tapes." Twelve hours of the more than 3,000 hours of tape were made public.

At the time however, the story was completely overshadowed by that far more pressing story, Vice President Cheney's hunting accident.

Bush has been trying to get the information out to the American public for months, according to Hayes.

Hayes writes:

On November 30, 2005, he gave a speech at the U.S. Naval Academy. Four members of Congress attended: Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Intelligence Committee; Sen. John Warner, the Virginia Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee; Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona; and Pence. After his speech, Bush visited with the lawmakers for 10 minutes in a holding room to the side of the stage. Hoekstra asked Bush about the documents and the president said he was pressing to have them released.

Says Pence: "I left both meetings with the unambiguous impression that the president of the United States wants these documents to reach the American people."

Negroponte never got the message. Or he is choosing to ignore it. He has done nothing to expedite the exploitation of the documents. And he continues to block the growing congressional effort, led by Hoekstra, to have the documents released.

Negroponte continues to stonewall, claiming that the documents have historical value, but nothing to offer in terms of intelligence. That's his justification for withholding the documents.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Even if the documents are only of historical interest, why not release the historically interesting documents?

Why prevent the public from access to what's on the tapes?

Hayes points out that the tapes aired on ABC raise questions.

Left unanswered was what the analysts made of the Iraqi official who reported to Saddam that components of the regime's nuclear program had been "transported out of Iraq." Who gave this report to Saddam and when did he give it? How were the materials "transported out of Iraq"? Where did they go? Where are they now? And what, if anything, does this tell us about Saddam's nuclear program? It may be that the intelligence community has answers to these questions. If so, they have not shared them. If not, the tapes are far more than "fascinating from a historical perspective."

Good questions, questions that should be addressed.

Hayes also relays:

Officials involved with DOCEX--as the U.S. government's document exploitation project is known to insiders--tell The Weekly Standard that only some 3 percent of the 2 million captured documents have been fully translated and analyzed. No one familiar with the project argues that exploiting these documents has been a priority of the U.S. intelligence community.

Negroponte's argument rests on the assumption that the history captured in these documents would not be important to those officials--elected and unelected, executive branch and legislative--whose job it is to craft U.S. foreign and national security policy. He's mistaken.

Now, Negroponte has altered his rationale for not releasing the documents. He came up with a new explanation, one that is the inverse of his previous excuse.

Perhaps anticipating the weakness of his "mere history" argument, Negroponte abruptly shifted his position last week. He still opposes releasing the documents, only now he claims that the information in these documents is so valuable that it cannot be made public. Negroponte gave a statement to Fox News responding to Hoekstra's call to release the captured documents. "These documents have provided, and continue to provide, actionable intelligence to ongoing operations. . . . It would be ill-advised to release these materials without careful screening because the material includes sensitive and potentially harmful information."

This new position raises two obvious questions: If the documents have provided actionable intelligence, why has the intelligence community exploited so few of them? And why hasn't Negroponte demanded more money and manpower for the DOCEX program?

Sadly, these obvious questions have an obvious answer. The intelligence community is not interested in releasing documents captured in postwar Afghanistan and Iraq. Why this is we can't be sure. But Pete Hoekstra offers one distinct possibility.

"They are State Department people who want to make no waves and don't want to do anything that would upset anyone," he says.

This is not idle speculation. In meetings with Hoekstra, Negroponte and his staff have repeatedly expressed concern that releasing this information might embarrass our allies.

...Hoekstra says Negroponte's intransigence is forcing him to get the documents out "the hard way." The House Intelligence chairman has introduced a bill (H.R. 4869) that would require the DNI to begin releasing the captured documents.

Obviously, President Bush wants the information released. He doesn't believe that potential embarrassment for our allies is an issue.

Why make Hoekstra go about getting the documents the hard way?

If the Saddam Files have the potential to influence public opinion on the war, then they are important and should not be held hostage by Negroponte.

Bush believes "that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. 'If I knew then what I know now,' Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, 'I would have been more supportive of the war.'"

Whatever their impact, Negroponte should listen to the President and open the Saddam Files now.

I can't help but think of the climactic courtroom scene in A Few Good Men.

Col. Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I'm entitled.
Col. Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I want the truth.
Col. Jessep: You can't handle the truth.

There's no question that the information should be released so that the public can determine its significance.

The American public deserves answers. I have no doubts that the public CAN handle the truth.