History speaks

Must it also be repeated? Newfound documents confirm old ties linking terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam | Mindy Belz

There they sit. Forty-eight thousand boxes containing thousands upon thousands of documents from the Saddam Hussein regime stacked variously to the heavens, entirely filling a desert warehouse where Central Command has its headquarters in Qatar—a message in a bottle writ as large as Wal-Mart. Three years since U.S. soldiers swept into Baghdad and began collecting pages out of Saddam's playbook on a regime allegedly involved in terrorism, in propagating weapons of mass destruction, and in plotting deadly war against the United States, that regime's written and audiotaped record remains largely unexamined, barely translated, and—until this month—grossly underestimated.

Faced with mounting pressure from Congress and the media to allow public access to some of the estimated millions of printed records and over 500 hours of audiotape, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte agreed March 16 to release select documents. Within days the directorate posted 125 separate items at its Foreign Military Studies Office website (fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm) and added to a roster of terrorism-related documents already available in a West Point database (www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony_docs.asp).