The Saddam Tapes: Another Intel Failure

A story you won't here on CNN, CBS, NBC or ABC:

From IBD:
Posted 3/28/2006

Intelligence: Bit by bit, the secret documents captured after the fall of Saddam Hussein are revealing shocking things about the Iraqi dictator's regime. One of the big questions is: Why didn't we know all this before?

We've tried hard not to join the boo-chorus that's used the war in Iraq to trash the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of its officers do extraordinary work under nearly impossible conditions. They are silent heroes whose efforts, sadly, too often go unrewarded and unrecognized.

But the CIA, unfortunately, is a bureaucracy too. And in that respect, it has much to answer for. The 48,000 boxes of documents taken back from Iraq and left to gather dust are a case in point.

The documents that have been retrieved and translated — largely by private scholars and even bloggers — ironically show the CIA was pretty much right in its assessment of Saddam, despite being brutally criticized.


To wit:

Saddam had WMD before the war, likely shipped them to other countries and planned to build them again. He was a real threat.

Saddam had links to al-Qaida that included: meetings in 1995 between Iraqi officials and the terrorist group;

Saddam's knowing acquiescence to the formation of Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaida offshoot, in northern Iraq; and the entry of key al-Qaida operatives Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into Iraq in 1999.

Saddam trained terrorists — possibly even al-Qaida terrorists, though this hasn't been proven — at a facility at Salman Pak that included a real commercial jet for hijacking practice.

Russia, Germany and France helped bolster Saddam's regime and arm it, despite U.N. sanctions on Iraq on which they signed off.


These are all significant facts — and should by themselves dispel doubts Americans have about going to war with Iraq. Yet, it took a document dump in recent weeks to learn of them. That dump, moreover, took place only because a handful of journalists and bloggers relentlessly pushed the CIA. The mainstream media have largely ignored it all, focusing instead on spurious claims of "civil war."

This is a big failure of our intelligence agencies. We now spend roughly $44 billion a year to spy on our enemies. Yet in recent years the CIA's main products seem to be: (1) a series of spectacular leaks from agency operatives intended to damage a sitting president during a time of war and (2) a glaring failure to make the case for taking out Saddam — and convincing the public the case is a strong one.

Errors, of course, are inevitable. But why did our spy agencies sit on so much information — information that could have been used to cinch the case for war? Perhaps Intelligence Director John Negroponte feared revelations about Russia, France and Germany would kill their cooperation on Iran. Or maybe CIA bureaucrats, in the throes of a badly needed shakeup administered by its new director, Porter Goss, are trying to sabotage the agency. We don't know.

What we do know, however, is that we might not have had so many fruitless debates about Iraq if the CIA hadn't sat on all this intelligence as long as it did.