The Iraq Files

It’s impossible to understand the Iraq war, our motivations for entering it, and the truth behind (erroneous?) intelligence projections without good information. Given this, its troubling that the MSM has all but ignored a fascinating new storehouse of information that sheds much light on what was going on in Iraq in the years before OIF began. Pajamas Media reports that over the past few weeks,

The Pentagon has begun to release some of the thousands of Iraqi government and military documents and media confiscated during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Some of these materials are translated, but many are in the original Arabic and were made public for translation by bloggers and others fluent in the language. This blog will be a repository for those translations and for commentary in various forms (text, audio and video) on them and on the already translated documents.

Over the past three years, we’ve all been subjected to impassioned arguments that Saddam had no connection to alQaeda; that there was no WMD program underway; that the President entered into the Iraq war without reservation or deliberation… the list of transgressions is long. More importantly, because these transgressions are repeated almost daily in the MSM, it demoralizes the public, as evidenced by new lows in opinion polls. It’s possible that each of these claims is true, but with voluminous new raw information being released daily, it would seem that the MSM would be ravenous – looking to prove each of it earlier assertions about the transgressions of our leadership. Yet, little if any comment has been made on the thousands of documents that have been released.

For example, Pajamas Media reports that:

Ray Robinson thinks he may have found [WMD and terrorist connections] in one of the Docex documents: a report by the Iraqi intelligence service that al-Quds, a Jihad organization composed of Palestinians fighting in Iraq, was planning to carry out an attack with anthrax supplied by Iraq. Robison claims it proves Saddam’s had at least small amounts of WMDs and that he would use terrorists to strike, “exactly the scenario that President Bush warned about.”

One document does not make a case, but it is intriguing and probably newsworthy. Have you heard about it from the MSM?

I suppose one could argue that it will take time to digest all of this information and that the MSM is proceeding cautiously. That simply doesn’t wash, given the MSM’s history of rapid (and often erroneous) reporting, inadequate analysis, and outright bias. It seems that when information is released that might conflict with the MSM’s pre-established world view, reporting is tempered with “caution.” But when information reflects negatively on this nation’s actions in the Middle East, it is often reported without proper vetting, without needed context, and with little or no caveats.

A paper trail is beginning to emerge. I just hope that the general public hears about it.