Read All About It
HAYES, STEPHEN F.
Read All About It Prewar Iraqi documents are of more than academic interest. BY STEPHEN F. HAYES AT HIS CONFIRMATION HEARING for the new post of director of national intelligence, John Negroponte...
...government...
...This was the understanding of American intelligence in the 1990s...
...intelligence community had evidence that Saddam Hussein was actively supporting Islamic radicals in the early 1990s...
...While some of these files have been exploited, many of them have not...
...Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control...
...Consequently, he has shown no interest in working with them against their common enemy, the United States...
...spending a significant amount of his time in consideration of this request...
...In some cases, the terrorist trainees posed for group photographs with their classmates, according to officials who have seen them...
...intelligence analysts were largely skeptical of reports that Saddam's regime collaborated with Islamic radicals...
...Understanding what we got right and what we got wrong about Iraq's involvement in terrorism is more than an academic exercise...
...Pete Hoekstra requested 40 mostly unclassified documents from postwar iraq...
...intelligence community continues to analyze the roles of other rogue states—Syria, Iran, North Korea—in support of terror...
...And what about fingerprints found on unexploded roadside bombs...
...Winning the fight in Iraq, meanwhile, requires making maximum use of intelligence resources at hand...
...Negroponte is surely right that our determined adversaries cannot be thwarted otherwise...
...Daniel Benjamin, a senior counterterrorism official on the National Security Council from 1994 to 1999, expressed this view in a New Yo^k Times op-ed on September 30, 2002: Saddam Hussein has long recognized that al Qaeda and like-minded Islamists represent a threat to his regime...
...When I spoke with him later, Bedlington elaborated on the relationship, saying, "Osama bin Laden had established contact with the GIA...
...Saddam was using bin Laden to ship funds to his own contacts through the GIA...
...officials, including several at the Department of Defense, have argued in internal deliberations that the exploitation of these materials is best left to historians...
...Report after report suggested that Iraq would be unlikely to work with radical Islamists, and vice versa, because of their religious and ideological differences...
...his own son-in-law told the U.N...
...Or on weapons seized in late-night raids...
...As for where to begin in exploiting the remaining documents, here's a suggestion: Hire a few thousand native-speakers of Arabic to read and categorize them, with careful crosschecking and U.S...
...he hosted conferences for radical Islamists from throughout the world...
...There certainly is no doubt that Saddam Hussein had pretty strong ties to bin Laden while he was in Sudan, whether it was directly or through (Sudanese) intermediaries...
...As a result of submitting fingerprints electronically, agencies receive electronic responses to criminal ten-print fingerprint submissions within two hours and within 24 hours for civil fingerprint submissions...
...Still, two months is a long time for the House Intelligence chairman to wait for unclassified documents...
...Testifying in April 2005, Negroponte said: I saw firsthand the savage depredations of terrorists and insurgents who oppose the birth of a new democracy...
...To date, some 50,000 of the 2 million "exploitable items" in the possession of the U.S...
...All the more reason to get serious...
...For instance, a February 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assess-ment—recently declassified and continually touted by Senator Carl Levin—concludes: "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements...
...And yet many of the intelligence analysts who studied the former Iraqi regime believed that such assistance was unlikely...
...We were convinced that money from Iraq was going to bin Laden, who was then sending it to places that Iraq wanted it to go," Bedlington told USA Today in December 2001...
...According to the FBI website, the database: provides automated fingerprint search capabilities, latent searching capability, electronic image storage, and electronic exchange of fingerprints and responses, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year...
...in 1995 that the regime was "instigating fundamentalism" throughout Iraq...
...But, again, Tenet's letter was the exception...
...Wouldn't this information be useful in interrogating captured foreign fighters...
...in fairness, Negroponte's office— like the intelligence community as a whole—has faced an abundance of pressing issues in recent weeks: the NSA wiretapping policy, Syrian support for terrorism, the iranian nuclear program, Russian manipulation of energy markets, North Korean intransigence...
...Within two hours of the attack, military ordnance specialists and FBI investigators examined those rockets and their makeshift launcher, lodged in the blue casing of an old generator...
...We traced considerable sums of money going from bin Laden to the GIA in Algeria...
...Consider just what we could have learned from public sources: Throughout the 1990s Saddam's rhetoric was increasingly the rhetoric of jihad...
...Other captured documents detail training that the Iraqi regime provided to thousands of Islamic terrorists in the years immediately preceding the U.S...
...Some U.S...
...It may be that the director's consideration of the request to open the files from Iraq involves weighing whether documents with value in fighting the insurgency should be withheld...
...The numbers are the best guesses of several officials who have worked on the document exploitation project...
...Although a Pentagon official says such training was "something we had some knowledge of prewar," U.S...
...and to gain a better understanding of the relationship between rogue regimes and the transregional terrorists they use to extend their power...
...Two weeks ago, Negroponte told Hoekstra that he was Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...BY STEPHEN F. HAYES AT HIS CONFIRMATION HEARING for the new post of director of national intelligence, John Negroponte pledged to keep open lines of communication with congress...
...What is the urgency, they ask, about translating and analyzing documents that come from a deposed regime...
...Or in recently abandoned insurgent safehouses...
...forces in Iraq...
...A hypothetical: What if these files contain fingerprints of Iraqi intelligence officials or Saddam Fedayeen fighters...
...officials familiar with them, the Iraqi Intelligence documents include detailed personnel files of Iraqi intelligence officers and operatives...
...If they did, imagine how useful such a database would have been in the subsequent investigation of the incident...
...There remain, then, approximately 1,950,000 items whose contents are unknown to anyone in the U.S...
...our failure to exploit the materials we have almost suggests we do not want to know all we can about the "terrorists and insurgents who oppose the birth of a new democracy...
...We believed some of the money came from Iraq...
...government have been examined by U.S...
...invasion of Iraq in March 2003...
...These are violent, determined adversaries who cannot be thwarted, captured or killed without close coordination between all of our intelligence assets—military and civilian, technical and human...
...intelligence analysts, many of them only for their relevance to the search for weapons of mass destruction...
...And he told me, "The office of the Director of National intelligence is presently evaluating chairman Hoekstra's and chairman Roberts's request for public access to iraqi documents and an overall iraq document exploitation effort...
...military action...
...More than two months ago, for instance, Rep...
...The GSPC was founded in the late 1990s after a split from another radical Islamist group known as the GIA (Armed Islamic Group...
...official who has worked on the document exploitation project...
...he expanded relations with Islamic fundamentalists like Sudan's Hassan-al Turabi...
...According to Stan Bedlington, a former senior analyst at the CIA's coun-terterrorism center, the GIA may have received Iraqi support in the months and years after the first Gulf war...
...Among the terrorist groups whose members received training in Iraq was the GSPC (Salafist Group for Call and Combat) from Algeria...
...It is about looking at the past to understand the present and to understand the future...
...It is important as the U.S...
...consider: Among the vast intelligence take are boxes and boxes of files captured from the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service...
...He declined to say when Hoekstra might get his documents...
...It's not about looking at the past to understand the past," says one former U.S...
...Or in understanding the structure of the foreign fighter network inside Iraq or the funding and recruitment mechanisms outside Iraq...
...A notable exception was George Tenet's October 7, 2002, letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which stated: "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al Qaeda, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S...
...That's a fair point, though whatever such value these nearly three-year-old files have is presumably diminishing...
...Both had ties to Saddam Hussein's regime and continue to have ties to Osama bin Laden...
...Or in breaking up terrorist cells...
...There are at least two answers: to defeat the insurgency in Iraq...
...The Iraqi training of jihadists before the war is one example...
...When insurgents attacked the al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad on october 26, 2003, 11 of their 40 rockets never fired...
...I don't know whether they pulled fingerprints from the unfired rockets...
...He also explained that his experience as the first U.S...
...Rosters of trainees, I am told, include names, birthdates, countries of origin, guerrilla warfare skills, and dates of training...
...What if that "understanding of American intelligence" was wrong...
...ambassador to iraq after the overthrow of saddam Hussein would help him meet the director's responsibility to—in the president's words—"make sure that those whose duty it is to defend America have the information they need to make the right decisions...
...So, according to Bedlington, the U.S...
...consider that perspective and that pledge to congress as you contemplate the government's inability to make meaningful use of the vast majority of the documents, computer hard drives, and other remnants of the Baathist regime acquired by U.S...
...So I asked Negroponte's spokesman for a progress report...
...According to U.S...
...in a separate request on November 18, 2005, Hoek-stra and Senate intelligence committee chairman Pat Roberts wrote to Negroponte seeking the public release of "tens of thousands of boxes of documents captured since the 1991 Desert Storm operation...
...The FBI's criminal Justice Information Services Division runs something known as the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System to track criminals in the United States...
...Exploiting this material would also help us better understand the nature of relationships between rogue regimes like Iraq and the transregion-al terrorists the regime supported...
...It is a safe bet that today some of these Iraqis are coordinating the insurgency...
...supervision...
...How about hiring a few thousand Iraqis...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 19
