Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents - Analysis of The Approach

Analysis of The Approach

Releasing the documents over the Internet to gain the help of translators around the world was an idea pushed by Congressman Pete Hoekstra. The Associated Press quoted Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project saying it's a "radical notion" that "members of the public could contribute to the intelligence analysis process. ... That is a bold innovation." The AP also quoted Glenn Reynolds, the blogger at Instapundit.com: "The secret of the 21st century is attract a lot of smart people to focus on problems that you think are important." After the documents were taken offline, however, Representative Hoekstra blamed the Administration for following this advice: "Well, you know, we have a process in place. It looks like they screwed up."

John Prados, author of the book, "Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War" said "I would bet that the materials that they chose to post were the ones that were suggestive of a threat." Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute, said the documents would have little WMD-related use: "The collection is good material for somebody who wants to do a biography of Saddam Hussein, but in terms of saying one thing or the other about weapons of mass destruction, it's not there."

Former CIA and State Department counterterrorism expert Larry C. Johnson said, "It's like putting firearms in the hands of children. The problem is that the documents without context aren't going to tell you a lot." Johnson also noted that "it's also an indictment of the intelligence community. They don't have the resources ... they haven't got the time to go through this stuff."

Other experts have suggested that the problem is that bloggers will cherry pick information from the documents to solidify their own perspectives without putting the tidbits they find in an overall historical context. Former CIA terrorism specialist Michael Scheuer pointed this out in an interview with the New York Times: "There's no quality control. You'll have guys out there with a smattering of Arabic drawing all kinds of crazy conclusions. Rush Limbaugh will cherry-pick from the right, and Al Franken will cherry-pick from the left."

According to history professor Fritz Umbach, the document archive has been seeded "with suggestive jihadist materials" unrelated to the war in Iraq, and cites specific examples. In a Salon.com article, Umbach claims to have identified "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." He also notes that the archive website was linked "to an entirely unrelated database of al-Qaida materials," the Harmony database, creating confusion over documents suggestive of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Umbach writes, "Whether intentional or not, the conflation and confusion of materials has been more than sufficient to convince bloggers on the political right that there were, as Bush officials insisted, operational links between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaida."