Ray Robison: Pointing out the obvious to the oblivious

Dick Morris on Hillary

Redstate talks about Dick Morris and his persistent opinion that Hillary will win if she runs. I don't like Morris personally, but I think he is astute on the politics of the left. However, in this case, maybe he has stopped hanging out in the libs circle because he missed the memo that the leftists hate her as much as the republicans. Go to the liberal blogs and read what they say about her. She is a republican in their eyes, although that may change if they have no choice but her after the democratic primaries.

Tally the votes for Hillary

Republicans 0-1%

Hardcore Leftists (your basic hate America crowd) 0-1%

Liberals 75%

Moderates maybe  50%

She won't carry moderates or republicans or the fringe 25% of the dems. She may win the primaries, but if the republicans have a popular alternative like Giuliani or Rice or even Praise be to Allah, Colin Powell forget it.

NYT - New York Traitors?

Traitor is not a word I bandy about. I would typically use it for those people selling classified U.S. info to foreign nations and Jane Fonda. Certainly not a politician arguing against a war like Murtha. Everybody has a right to an opinion (except the liberal avenger who has lost that right under the new Stupid People Should Shut Up Act of 2006).

The American Thinker has an article about a NYT article detailing weaknesses in U.S. body armor. Giving the terrorists guidance as to how to kill G.I.s, well you tell me if that is traitorous. I certainly think so.

Throwing water on the fire...

In his article Post-Haste Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard discusses the release of a few documents (very few) captured in Iraq. I am pleased to see some reward for his efforts to convince the government to release the captured Iraqi documents. But now I have to throw water on the blog fire.

Earlier this week, I discussed the plan by the Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte to release thousands of NIV items first. You may or may not know that I worked with ISG processing and analyzing these documents and other media. As I discussed in the previous article, NIV is the trash. There is nothing of intelligence value in these items or they would be IV.

One of the reasons for the resistance to the release of these documents is the risk that people would not be able to apply context to these documents and would make incorrect assertions. The limited release of nine document has proven that concern to be valid.

Three documents have already fooled some of the leading bloggers (I don’t want to name names, but you know who you are, pretty much all of you).

ABC News released very helpful translations that I will use.

The first document contains a summary of information derived from an Afghanistan (presumably Taliban) official:


"Osama bin Laden and the Taliban"
Document dated Sept. 15, 2001
An Iraqi intelligence service document saying that their Afghani informant, who's only identified by a number, told them that the Afghani Consul Ahmed Dahastani claimed the following in front of him:
That OBL and the Taliban are in contact with Iraq and that a group of Taliban and bin Laden group members visited Iraq.
That the U.S. has proof the Iraqi government and "bin Laden's group" agreed to cooperate to attack targets inside America.
That in case the Taliban and bin Laden's group turn out to be involved in "these destructive operations," the U.S. may strike Iraq and Afghanistan.
That the Afghani consul heard about the issue of Iraq's relationship with "bin Laden's group" while he was in Iran.

As noted by the ABC editor, this is not substantial evidence. This is a guy reporting what he heard from another guy reporting what he heard. It is hearsay within hearsay. Although I do not rule it out as being accurate, I find this to be a very unreliable source. I am very eager to prove the link. But this isn’t it (see the catagory Saddam and al-Qaeda for real evidence of the link).

Another document details the structure of the Iraq Intelligence Service. But if you pay attention you can see the link to the FAS.org website that the bulk of the document content was downloaded from.  This document is most likely an Iraqi counterintelligence review of open source items to find out what is public about the IIS. There is nothing new in this document although it fooled a pundit at a major blog site.

The other document causing a stir is described on the FMSO website:

Synopsis: 2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between IRS members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names.

This document is causing a sensation because it has photos of al-Zarqawi. I don’t have a translation at the time of this writing, but it looks very much like a dossier. The subject of the writing could be that he has been detected in Iraq and needs to be dealt with, or it could an introduction for further collaboration. My gut tells me it is surveillance and identification, not evidence of collusion.

Why do I think that? Because as I said, NIV has just that, no intelligence value.

So far, this is as I predicted, all junk. I am still waiting to see the translation on the al-Zarqawi dossier, but everything else in these documents is hearsay or already well known. The only evidence I see so far is in support of my belief that Director Negroponte is stalling for time by releasing junk.

The Jawa Report has it

Michelle Malkin has it

Dread Pundit Bluto

the anchoress   

Update: thanks to the American Thinker for the interest in the article

Update: For those who have not read my work let me make clear that I am convinced based on the evidence I have seen that Saddam had limited WMD capability shortly before the war. I also am convinced he did use terrorist organizations such as the Egyption Islamic Jihad (which makes up a large chunk of al-Qaeda) outside of Iraq, but that he would not tolerate them in Iraq unless controlled tightly in training camps or "field offices". This piece is just a word of caution about the difference between hard evidence and hearsay.

Some release of Iraq documents

Reader Mark gave me a heads up on a new Weekly Standard article from Stephen Hayes about the release of Iraqi documents. This excerpt:

What did Saddam Hussein privately tell Yasser Arafat when the Palestinian leader came to Baghdad?

Keep an eye on that one.....more later. Stephen Hayes has done an awesome job on this and it it great to see his efforts succeed. Lunch Posting time complete!

UPDATE: if you go to this site it has the newly released documents but note most of them were made public weeks ago documents

What's in the box?

UPDATE: As reported on the American Thinker

Gary Gross of the California Conservative alerted me today to this Reuters article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration on Monday said it was preparing to release prewar Iraqi government material from a trove of documents and tape-recordings captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The office of U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte decided in recent days to fund a review and release process for an estimated 48,000 boxes of documents and hundreds of recorded conversations, including many involving Saddam Hussein himself, officials said.

The material, removed from Iraq to Qatar, has already been reviewed by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group and continues to be scrutinized for intelligence by the U.S. military, officials said.

But officials said Negroponte's Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, is expected to move quickly to release as much of the material as possible.

"The ODNI is committed to expediting the review and release of the materials," a Negroponte spokeswoman said.

I also read another article today from Stephen Hayes at The Weekly Standard that covered this story and stated that Negroponte was planning to release the information classified as "NIV" which was called a good first step.

Negroponte began to soften his opposition. The two men spoke Wednesday morning, and the DNI told Hoekstra he was open to releasing some of the documents labeled "no intelligence value" as a way to begin the release process. Hoekstra took the offer as a good first step, but in a letter to Negroponte that same day insisted that documents relevant to the war be included in any release.

As you may or may not know, I worked with ISG in the media section in Qatar. I am not sure what the Director is referring to here. If he is talking about the raw NIV documents, then what we are looking at is  a process of going through a warehouse full of thousands of boxes looking for the ones marked NIV, months.  Taking them to port and shipping them to the states or flying them here in military transports, weeks to months. Then they have to be received in the U.S. and warehoused again while a process is put in place to distribute them out to the organizations identified for the review process, months. My best guess, if this is the process, it will be well into 2007 before the analysis starts.

What I hope Negroponte has in mind is to release the digital copies of this material. Portions of it were scanned and archived into the Harmony database. If the Harmony database in Qatar has been connected to the stateside portion, then it is no problem. It will still take months to download to CD and DVD media or external hard drives and ship to the analysts or months even if they are sent over network, but much better than the physical transport method.  If the database is not connected, then they will wait until it is connected, or the documents will have to be downloaded to another media and shipped from Qatar. In that case, we are still looking at 2007.

And what are we waiting for?

What exactly is NIV? The processing of these documents involved a triage section that categorized documents by No Intelligence Value (NIV), Intelligence Value (IV), and other special categories. Quite simply, the NIV is the trash.

When these items were captured, there was limited ability to triage on site. Most of it was thrown into boxes after a quick look through, then sent to an ISG facility. Then the items were given harmony numbers before they were triaged in some cases.

Once an item has a harmony number, it is going to be scanned and archived, no matter what it is. It is just identified as NIV in the database. It could be a grocery list captured in an Iraq Intelligence Service office. If it had any intelligence value, it would be IV. In other words, Negroponte is trying to pacify the President of the United States and Congressman Hoekstra with trash. If the document or video or audio tape had one bit of value, it wouldn't be NIV.

Now there will be a few cases of misidentified documents getting released. And there is a very small possibility that something interesting will be released. But most of the stuff I worked with turned out to be movies and cartoons. And if it wasn't, it was IV.

So what we are looking at is a process that will take months or years, not weeks and cost thousands of dollars to release the trash so Mr. Negroponte can mollify interested parties like the President.

Folks, if this is the plan, to only release NIV, then forget it. Might as well save the money unless you need an extra copy of a 1970's movie.

What's worse is that Mr. Negroponte has to know this. He has to know that by releasing NIV documents first it will absorb money and resources for a year or more and he won't have to deal with reviewing IV documents for release any time soon. And he has to be aware that this is against the President's intent.

What does that tell about the mindset of our nation's intelligence community?

Outside the Beltway open blog

Update: thanks to The American Thinker for the interest.

QandO on Saddam

Michelle Malkin has more

Condi said what?

One of the people I admire most is Condi RIce. She has book smarts and a fair amount of common sense. So I was shocked to read that she praised Indonesian tolerance:

Rice Praises Muslim Indonesia's Tolerance

By ANNE GEARAN
AP Diplomatic Writer

AP Photo/ACHMAD IBRAHIM

 
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice courted the moderate brand of Islam that prevails in multiethnic Indonesia, but acknowledged Tuesday that U.S. foreign policy is often unpopular in the Muslim world.

"I understand that the United States has had to do things in the world that are not that popular in much of the world," Rice said in response to a question about anti-American sentiment that has arisen since the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beginning a two-day visit to a key U.S. ally in the struggle against terrorism - and the world's most populous Muslim nation - Rice said sometimes there is a "lack of understanding about how much the United States respects people of the Islamic faith."

She pointed to the outpouring of support by Americans following the 2004 tsunami that killed 130,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province alone. She noted that besides U.S. government aid, private American citizens sent millions of dollars to help rebuild.

 
Rice's visit drew hundreds of Islamic hard-liners to demonstrate outside the heavily guarded U.S. embassy. The crowd was far smaller than last week's rally by about 5,000 people, who demanded that U.S. troops leave Iraq and Afghanistan and called Bush a terrorist and a colonialist.

Rice held up Indonesia as an example of tolerance, making an implicit contrast with extremist Muslim ideology and Islamic terrorism.

"I don't think there's any disagreement that we need to fight this common enemy," Rice said. Terrorists have struck in Bali and Jakarta in recent years, including a fatal blast at the downtown hotel where Rice's party stayed.

Look, I am certainly no expert on Indonesia. But as I recall, they are one of the most antagonistic nations to Christians:

5 November, 2004 
INDONESIA
Christian man decapitated in new violence in Indonesia's Poso


Poso (AsiaNews/Agencies) - A Christian man has been killed by decapitation in the latest attack against non-Muslims in the sectarian violence-hit eastern Indonesian town of Poso, police said on Friday.

Residents found a plastic bag containing the head of the 48-year-old village chief late on Thursday in the Poso Pesisir area of Central Sulawesi province, district deputy police chief Rudi Trenggono said.

"We have no suspects at the moment but this could be a personally-motivated case or another attempt to antagonise both Muslim and Christian communities here," he said.

He said a homemade bomb went off in the nearby hills in the area about one hour after the discovery but there were no reports of damage or casualties.

Poso has seen intermittent communal violence between Muslims and Christians since 2000 despite a government-brokered peace accord agreed two years ago.

Thursday's incidents followed the unsolved shooting of a man in the grounds of a church in Poso last month.

Also last month, a Hindu woman was killed and two Christian men wounded when a group fired randomly into houses in the region on the same day that two Christians were hacked to death near the provincial capital Palu.

AND an excellent article here Spiegel online about Indonesia and Islamofascists

Talking to Jihadis

By Michael Scott Moore


As the United States tries to spread democracy throughout the Muslim world, a rare meeting with Islamic radicals in Indonesia shows the downside of the country's post-Suharto representative politics: It has allowed fundmentalists to openly thrive in a country where they were once suppressed. Are there lessons to be learned here for Iraq?

AND The Sydney Morning Herald

Hundreds of security forces were deployed in a tense Indonesian province today to prevent revenge attacks after assailants wearing black veils beheaded three Christian schoolgirls and seriously wounded a fourth.

Police refused to speculate on who was behind Saturday's grisly murder in Central Sulawesi, an area that has a long history of violence between Muslims and Christians, saying the investigation was continuing.

There are many more stories but you get the picture. Beheading of Christians may become an Olympic sport if the Indonesians get their way. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING CONDI! I am all for diplomacy and I realize that sometimes you have to take the bad with the good. But chopping off little girls heads because they have a different religion, that's pretty much where you say, get you S*%& straight or we will crush you, not pat them on the back.

Stephen Hayes on the Iraq documents

Stephen Hayes has been on the case of the Iraq documents for some time now. His new article in
The Weekly Standard deals with a rather encouraging development.

On February 16, President George W. Bush assembled a small group of congressional Republicans for a briefing on Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley were there, and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad participated via teleconference from Baghdad. As the meeting was beginning, Mike Pence spoke up. The Indiana Republican, a leader of conservatives in the House, was seated next to Bush.

"Yesterday, Mr. President, the war had its best night on the network news since the war ended," Pence said.

"Is this the tapes thing?" Bush asked, referring to two ABC News reports that included excerpts of recordings Saddam Hussein made of meetings with his war cabinet in the years before the U.S. invasion. Bush had not seen the newscasts but had been briefed on them.

Pence framed his response as a question, quoting Abraham Lincoln: "One of your Republican predecessors said, 'Give the people the facts and the Republic will be saved.' There are 3,000 hours of Saddam tapes and millions of pages of other documents that we captured after the war. When will the American public get to see this information?"

Bush replied that he wanted the documents released. He turned to Hadley and asked for an update. Hadley explained that John Negroponte, Bush's Director of National Intelligence, "owns the documents" and that DNI lawyers were deciding how they might be handled.

Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war."

As you may or may not know, I worked with the Iraq Survey Group for a year. Eventually, I became the day shift supervisor for the "media" section at the Combined Media Processing Center in Qatar. The media section worked with audio and video tape to analyze, digitize, and archive media captured in Iraq. We also worked with digital media.

The media was initially Saddam regime related and then we started to get insurgent and terrorist related propaganda. For those of you who hear people say there are no or few terrorists (Mujahedeen) in Iraq, tell them I spent many hours pouring over terrorist propaganda, Mujahedeen training videos (more accurately CDs), and their home videos. Let me just say having seen captured home video from Fallujah, that place was a terrorist convention. By the time we launched the final battle (along with thousands of Iraqi troops) Fallujah was mostly occupied by Mujahedeen. I sure didn't see any families or children in the videos. Only non-Iraqi Arabs walking around with their AK-47s. Fallujah was a just battle.

The Saddam Regime video contained a lot of U.N. inspections recorded by the Iraqis. That is why this Stephen Hayes article is interesting to me. I and my partner filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtained some specific items I reviewed while with the media section. The request was filed last summer. I have since spoken with the person in charge of fulfilling that request and I have the impression that it may take years to complete the request, even though he called it a relatively small request.

There is a video in existence that will go a long way towards making the case that Saddam had WMD shortly before we invaded. Now I won't call it the 100% smoking gun, but I think it will tip the scale to convince a lot of people. What is so frustrating, is that the video has been available for years.

I know "if Bush had this he would have shown it years ago, case closed."

Yes, if he knew he had it.

It is one video among thousands of videos. The people who know about it don't really seem to interested in it. I think that is because the people who know about it are already believers and don't  really worry about convincing the public.

I do. I think the reputation of this country has been ruined for a lie. Not a lie that Saddam had WMD, but the lie that he didn't.

I have tried to contact my local representative to no avail. I  have been rejected by Hoekstra's office because he does not represent my district. Senator Sessions office told me to just continue through the process, which may take years.

So I am left with no other choice but to go public. If the Bush Administration or any member of Congress wants to get the evidence, I will go so far as to fly with you to Qatar and get the video from the database (the database in Qatar was not merged with the U.S. database last I knew). I will go get it and you can see it before you go public with supporting my case. Contact me and we can make it happen, sometime BEFORE the 2006 elections would be smart.

on Blackfive http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/03/stephen_f_hayes.html

californiaconservative has more

qando.net has more on future Iraq WMD

Let Freedom Ring has more

Gen. Sada at townhall.com

General Sada is a former Iraqi air force general who has been revealing to congress how Saddam moved his WMD to Syria. I take him with a grain of salt because he is of course, hocking a book. But it might be something. Time will tell.

Hat tip to www.headspaceandtiming.com

It's Crash

I'm not much into the Oscars. I became disgusted with Hollywood and mainstream media hypocrisy many years ago. Such as this AP report:

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/03/05/D8G5RKA00.html

"In a year of provocative films at the Oscars, "Crash" was one of the fiercest, a portrait of simmering racial and cultural tension among blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians and Arabs."

Thank God we have Hollywood to point out how we Joe Schmoes need to be more aware of cultural sensitivities. Thank God we have wonderful Asian and Arab actors like:

"The large cast of "Crash" includes supporting-actor nominee-winner Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Terrence Howard, Thandie Newton, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Jennifer Esposito and Ryan Phillippe."

Eeerrrrrr.......

Michelle Malkin has more links to Oscars discussions. http://www.michellemalkin.com

Captain's Quarters has more Turan: Hollywood Isn't Liberal Enough

Pat Tillman

Pat Tillman, what an awesome guy. The army is beginning what the AP is calling a criminal investigation.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,186840,00.html

According to what I have read, the story is clearly a tragedy, an accident, and not the army's finest moment at getting out relevant information. However, the army is frequently accused of giving a false account when it is actually the media that has reported unconfirmed accounts, whipped up a myth, and then wanted to blame the army for the egg on their faces. Jessica Lynch anybody?

For those who don't remember, she was captured in Iraq and the media reported she went down guns blazing. After her rescue, it came out she was unable to fight the attackers.

Then Katie Couric on the Today Show tried to make Jessica say the army used her. Jessica held strong and said that she didn't feel that way (like when Bono praised the President and drove Couric nuts- both fine moments).

What bugs me about this AP report is this:

"Officers destroyed critical evidence and concealed the truth from Tillman's brother, also an Army Ranger, who was nearby, the report found"

Certainly when I read that, I thought of Generals shredding reports. What this sentence is actually referring to is the Non Commissioned Officers who burned Tillman's BDUs and body armor. A non commissioned officer is a Sergeant. This is not a bunch of officers at the Pentagon trying to crush an investigation. It is some NCOs and maybe the Lieutenant platoon leader playing CYOA. They screwed up and they knew it and tried to save their careers.

So the AP reporting can’t quite get it right, of course. The identity of those officers involved in the cover up should have been made clear, that it was the men involved in the incident, not an official cover up.

Should this be a criminal matter? I wasn’t there but I don’t think so. UCMJ punishment has already been administered to the NCOs for the cover up. Clearance of fires is always a problem and a failure is not a necessarily a criminal act unless details come out that I haven’t heard yet such as drinking.