Sunshine for the Iraq Files

The Wall Street Journal, Page 22
By Laurie Mylroie

It has taken far too long, but it looks as if the Bush Administration has finally decided to release most of Saddam Hussein's secret documents. That word came late Monday from the Directorate of National Intelligence, the new executive branch office that is supposed to coordinate the various American intelligence services.

Only last week, the DNI seemed determined to keep secret -- or at least release very s-l-o-w-l-y -- the millions of documents, computer files and audio tapes captured in Iraq and Afghanistan and now collected in Qatar as part of what's called the Harmony document exploitation program. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte had publicly said the material was largely of "historical" value, and had shown no great urgency to find out what was in them.

But now Mr. Negroponte has done an about-face, though not without pressure from Congress and perhaps also from his boss, President Bush. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra and Senator Rick Santorum both refused to take no for an answer and even introduced legislation that would require the DNI to be more forthcoming. Mr. Bush had also privately expressed to Members of Congress his desire to get the documents out, and that message may finally have made its way down through the bureaucracy. Once in a while in Washington, even Presidents get their way.

Mr. Hoekstra told us yesterday he's been talking to Mr. Negroponte and other senior DNI officials in recent days, and that they've committed to begin "aggressively" releasing documents on the Internet as soon as this week. He says he also senses a spirit of openness and compromise that he hadn't before. For example, DNI officials initially balked at releasing their own potentially flawed translations of the largely Arabic language documents. But they have now agreed to do so with the caveat that interested parties would be well-advised to double check the accuracy of the DNI's work.

The Congressman has also been told that documents won't be kept secret because of mere uncertainty about possible -- and vague -- "national interest" implications. And, finally, Congress will have an oversight role regarding documents that the DNI decides should remain classified for whatever reason.

We don't think Mr. Hoekstra is exaggerating when he says that removing these materials from the exclusive domain of the U.S. intelligence community and offering them to all interested analysts will cut years off the amount of time it takes to extract the important information they contain. While some of what's uncovered may be misleading, we trust an open process to discover the truth more than we do intelligence services with a stake in defending their previous (mis)judgments.

This information may well shed light on whether Saddam planned the insurgency that we and the Iraqis are now fighting, or whether he canoodled with Islamist terrorists, as some of the documents already translated suggest. Only this week, we are learning from the new book on Iraq by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor that many of Saddam's own generals believed he had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them. So much for the allegation that "Bush lied" about WMD; Saddam lied to everyone.

All of these issues are highly relevant to the ongoing debate over how the U.S. is fighting both in Iraq and in the larger war on terror, and where we should go from here. The Iraq War is a long way from being over, and anything we can know about the accuracy of our judgments before and during the fight is well worth trying to uncover and understand.