Why Is The Pentagon Covering Up For Saddam Hussein?

It's been said on many an occasion in this space that the Bush Administration seems, at times, loathe to help its own political fortunes by making the best possible defense - or, indeed, ANY defense - of its GWOT policy in general and its campaign in Iraq in particular.

As Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has discovered anew, that tendency is still a live and well:

For the second time in recent weeks the Department of Defense has denied a request from The Weekly Standard to release unclassified documents recovered in postwar Iraq. These documents apparently reveal, in some detail, activities of Saddam Hussein's regime in the years before the war. This second denial could also be the final one: According to two Pentagon sources, the program designed to review, translate, and analyze data from the old Iraqi regime may be shuttered at the end of December, not just placing the documents beyond the reach of journalists, but also making them inaccessible to policymakers.

As a consequence, the ongoing debate over the Iraq war and its origins is taking place without crucial information about the former Iraqi regime and its relationships with presumed U.S. allies and known U.S. enemies. Despite the determined shredding and burning efforts of regime officials in the dying days of Saddam Hussein's government, much of this information still exists - in handwritten documents, in videotapes and audiotapes, in photographs and satellite images, on computer hard drives. All told, the U.S. government has in its possession more than 2 million "exploitable" items from the former Iraqi regime (the intelligence community's term of art for information it thinks might be useful). According to sources with knowledge of the project, now two and a half years old, only 50,000 documents have been translated and fully exploited. Few of those translated documents have been circulated to policymakers in the Bush Administration. And although one of the translated documents was leaked to the New York Times last summer, none of the others has been released, formally or informally.

The result: Much of today's debate about the threat posed three years ago by Saddam Hussein's Iraq is based on past assessments by U.S. intelligence agencies that we now know had no real sources on the ground in Iraq. The Bush Administration seems remarkably uninterested in discovering, now that we have reams of material from Saddam's regime, what the actual terror-related and WMD-related activities of that regime were. But as the political debate of recent weeks makes clear, answering these questions remains central to the debate over the war. More important, it cannot be the case that there's nothing helpful to the ongoing war on terror in these files. [emphasis added]

Ed Morrissey plucked out just three examples of the treasure trove of vindication for the President's decision to liberate Iraq:

* Intelligence coded memo by two IIS officers containing info on various topics; weapons boat, Palestinians training in Iraq, etc.

* Concerning mass graves found in the south: Check for nuclear radiation, identify bodies, ensure that CNN is the first news agency onsite. Any funerals should have an international impact. Signed by Hussein.

* Various correspondence e.g. visa forms, trade delegations, full reports on the connections between Abu Sayaf and the Qadafi Charity Establishment. Report on a certain individual traveling to Pakistan and involvements with bin Laden.

Here is evidence of Iraq's sponsorship of Islamist terrorism, nuclear weapons program, connections with al Qaeda, and penetration of at least one American news organization, all in a mere eighty-seven words. And the Pentagon has only bothered to even translate only one Saddamite document out of every forty.

There is reluctance to engage in political combat and then there is open hostility to it. The Democrats have gone stark-raving insane in their crypto-treasonous obsession with undermining and discrediting the entire GWOT, to the extent of openly and vehemently insisting, in complete defiance of reality, that the war is not just unwinnable but has already been lost. And here sits a White House and majority party in possession not just of the Dems' own seditious public comments, but a literal mountain of positive documentary proof that would completely bury their opponents at a stroke - reiterating ALL the arguments for toppling Saddam, not just the democracy angle, showing beyond a shadow of a doubt that pre-war intelligence erred on the side of caution, not overstatement - and they're going to bury the evidence instead.

It would be nice if evidence spoke for itself. 'Tis a perplexing pity that even if it did, the Bushies seem intent on not even allowing that.