Bush's bogus document dump(seeded public archive docs with jihadist materi

Bush's bogus document dump

The administration seeded its new public archive of Iraq documents with jihadist materials completely unrelated to Saddam.

By Fritz Umbach

Apr. 13, 2006 | While the world has watched claim after claim about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction dissolve like a mirage, the Bush administration has never deviated from one assertion in its shifting case for war: that there was an operational connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida. As evidence of the manipulation of prewar intelligence keeps surfacing, the administration has now taken that equally dubious claim and made it virtual.

Lacking evidence of a real-world link between Saddam and the perpetrators of 9/11, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by Bush appointee John Negroponte, has apparently decided to create one in cyberspace -- by seeding its new online Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents archive with suggestive jihadist materials, and by linking the site to an entirely unrelated database of al-Qaida materials.

On March 15, the ODNI began releasing what Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, described on his Web site as "millions of pages of documents, recordings and other media captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom and Desert Storm." When he tried to convince the ODNI to declassify the material earlier this year, Hoekstra argued, "There may be many documents that relate to their WMD programs. Those should be released. Same thing with links to terrorism." Once the ODNI had released the material, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave it a nod of approval, telling NBC's Tim Russert on March 26, "We're going to find some important and surprising things in these documents."

The first surprising thing we find in the documents, which are available here through the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office's Joint Reserve Intelligence Center, is that they are not necessarily from, or even about, Iraq. For example, document 2RAD-2004-601189 is described as "Abu-Zubaydah Statement on the Capability of al-Qaidah to Manufacture and Deliver Nuclear Weapons to the U.S." Sounds like smoking-gun material, but what exactly does it have to do with the case for war against Saddam? Zubaydah, a top bin Laden operative who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, told interrogators that al-Qaida could build a "dirty bomb," but he didn't say anything about getting Saddam's help to do it. Moreover, the "statement" itself is nothing more than an Arabic summary of a 2002 CBS News story on Zubaydah's claims. It has no identifiable link to Iraq, other than the odd fact that it appears on a U.S. government site billed as Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents.

The Zubaydah example has plenty of company among the declassified documents, many of which were examined by this Arabic speaker. Interspersed throughout the more than 1,300 documents apparently produced by Saddam's regime are approximately 40 files that are either completely unrelated to Iraq, or that are related only through jihadist elements of the insurgency that began after Saddam's fall.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/04/13/document_dump/print.html