Decision ‘08

A Liberal Dilemma

How are advocates of the viewpoint of George Bush as lawless tyrant reacting to the prospect of the government posting tens of thousands of documents online for public perusal and translation reacting? I’m talking, of course, about the Iraqi document project, an endeavor pushed by Pajamas Media that is now making headlines around the world:

There are up to 55,000 boxes, with possibly millions of pages. The documents are being posted a few at a time — so far, about 600 — on a Pentagon Web site, often in Arabic with an English summary.

Regardless of what they reveal, open-government advocates like the decision to make them available.

It’s a “radical notion,” said Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. That “members of the public could contribute to the intelligence analysis process. … That is a bold innovation.”

…A self-described Iraqi blogger translated one of the documents for the American blog pajamasmedia.com — a Sept. 15, 2001, memo from the Iraqi intelligence service that reported about an Afghan source who had been told that a group from Osama bin Laden and the Taliban had visited Iraq.

So, important stuff, no? Not if you’re an opponent of President Bush:

“I would bet that the materials that they chose to post were the ones that were suggestive of a threat,” said John Prados, author of the book, “Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War.”

Prados, an analyst with the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute, dismissed the documents: “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.”

How does Prados know this? Didn’t I just read that there were 55,000 boxes, with millions of pages, and that the Pentagon is releasing about 600 documents at a time? Or could it be that Prados is blowing smoke out of his posterior because the document dump is in danger of blowing the concept behind his book?

Don’t bother Juan Cole with the facts, either, or the Kos Kidz. Given the revelations already found in the documents regarding Saddam’s WMDs and a cozier-than-expected relationship with Osama bin Laden, not to even mention today’s confession of involvement in 9/11 by Zacarias Moussaoui, doesn’t it make sense to look over those documents carefully? Might our comrades on the left be curious as to what, if anything, they might tell us about these and other events?

Surely there are Arabic speakers who are Bush opponents (I know, going out on a limb there)? Why can’t they translate some of these documents and prove us all wrong? Where’s the curiousity? Where’s the search for the truth? Where’s the courage?

How many rhetorical questions in a row will I ask?…

4 Responses to “A Liberal Dilemma”

1 Jojo Says:
March 28th, 2006 at 1:45 am
Their charge is the Pentagon would focus on releasing documents that are beneficial to the Bush Administration. I don’t see how translating the already-released documents would help much to answer that argument.
2 Mark Says:
March 28th, 2006 at 8:30 am
If the documents are genuine, and they are not interested in translating them for partisan reasons, then that speaks for itself…
3 Oyster Says:
March 28th, 2006 at 9:51 am
They’re only interested in posting documents that were “suggestive of a threat”?

As opposed to what? All the documents that were suggestive of Saddam’s humanitarian legacies or all the documents that were suggestive of their massive efforts to stop the OFF abuses or all the documents that were suggestive of how they tried so hard to turn over al Qaeda operatives to the world court or …
4 topsecretk9 Says:
March 28th, 2006 at 10:19 am
Those goalposts are on the move. It’s good to keep talking about this at the early stages of the doc dump, because the left has reached a point that no matter how incriminating the information they stick McChimpyHitler in front of it in order to dismiss. The only way for this (Doc Dump) to have impact force the left to explain at every turn and if they continue to ignore or dismiss eventually it will become their problem.