Stephen Hayes writes another excellent article in the March 20th edition of The Weekly Standard that details the continuing stubbornness of the DNI in their refusal to release the Saddam documents:
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 extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud 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.”
Bush told Hadley to expedite the release of the Iraq documents. “This stuff ought to be out. Put this stuff out.” The president would reiterate this point before the meeting adjourned. And as the briefing ended, he approached Pence, poked a finger in the congressman’s chest, and thanked him for raising the issue. When Pence began to restate his view that the documents should be released, Bush put his hand up, as if to say, “I hear you. It will be taken care of.”
[…]For months, Negroponte has argued privately that while the documents may be of historical interest, they are not particularly valuable as intelligence product. A statement by his office in response to the recordings aired by ABC said, “Analysts from the CIA and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that, while fascinating from a historical perspective, the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their postwar analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs.”
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.”
He then goes on to detail a specific file that laid out the training of Iraqi intelligence agents by the Russians and how this is not just “fascinating historical documents”
[…]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. Who does Negroponte have in mind?
Allies like Russia?
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.
[…]”I’m encouraged that John is taking another look at it,” Hoekstra said last Thursday. “But I want a system that is biased in favor of declassification. I want some assurance that they aren’t just picking the stuff that’s garbage and releasing that. If we’re only declassifying maps of Baghdad, I’m not going to be happy.”
He continued: “There may be many documents that relate to Iraqi WMD programs. Those should be released. Same thing with documents that show links to terrorism. They have to release documents on topics of interest to the American people and they have to give me some kind of schedule. What’s the time frame? I don’t have any idea.”
Hoekstra is not going away. “We’re going to ride herd on this. This is a step in the right direction, but I am in no way claiming victory. I want these documents out.”
So does President Bush. You’d think that would settle it.
Read the complete article and you come away from it with no other conclusion that the documents are damning to the Russians. Did they help Iraq get rid of the WMD’s? If so why would we give a damn if we shoved their faces in it?

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