The Weekly Standard's William Kristol has a suggestion for the Bush Administration: Release the documents captured after Saddam fell.
Can we ever really know the whole truth--or almost the whole truth? Yes. How? Let us--all of us--read the mass of documents captured after the fall of the Saddam regime. Stephen Hayes's reporting, including his article in this issue, suggests to us that these documents would confirm the argument for a terror connection. But let everyone make up his own mind, based on his own reading of the documents.
So: The U.S. government should release the documents. It should authenticate documents where possible, and then release them promptly, as they are authenticated. Or, if that is too onerous a process--and lots of time has already gone a-wasting--it should simply release all the documents, perhaps with whatever is known about their provenance and likely authenticity, and let news organizations, experts, and others make their own judgments.
Aren't most of these documents classified? Actually, no. And why should they be? After all, Saddam's regime is gone, all the information is at least three years old--and where there are still actionable items relating to individuals, that information could of course be redacted. Perhaps a few documents could not be released. But a great many could be.
"Open-source" processing of these documents could be very useful. The Iraq war is a hot topic, so a large number of highly interested volunteers would pore over these documents, finding any inconsistencies, or any intelligence, not yet uncovered by the experts.
(Consider how long it took interested amateurs to find the flaws in the Dan Rather memos.)
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