Surfing for WMD: republicans force release of captured Iraq documents [View All]

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Surfing for WMD

The New York Times
MONDAY, APRIL 3, 2006
http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/04/03/news/edweb.php

In a monumental departure from the Bush administration's addiction to secrecy, U.S. government intelligence agencies have begun posting on the Internet hundreds of thousands of Arabic-language documents captured in the invasion of Iraq. With the click of a mouse, fresh searches are being conducted by amateur sleuths intent on finding contrarian, grassy-knoll perspectives on the now generally accepted conclusion that there were no weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq.

Conservative publications were demanding public access to the 48,000 boxes of captured documents, as if weapons of mass destruction evidence would turn up in some of the long-winded, despot-worshiping examples of bureaucratese already on exhibit.

Republican lawmakers threatened to force the disclosure, so intelligence officials freed the material for the Web (fmso.leavenworth.army. mil/products-docex. htm), with an emphatic caution that the material contained no smoking guns, any more than Iraq contained weapons of mass destruction. In fact, intelligence officials have warned that the document dump is laced with hearsay, disinformation and forgery.

That has not stopped some early cries of eureka by bloggers on the right. But we applaud the demand for information they've been championing. The Bush administration too often dishonors that principle of openness and candor. The description by The New York Times's Scott Shane of an "army of amateurs" free to cherry-pick bits of loosely translated, murky information for biased purposes sounds no worse a prospect than the White House's track record in engineering the invasion.

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/04/03/news/edweb.php

"army of amateurs"

- army of morans

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