Yesterday
a recommended diary by Maha revealed that Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte dumped documents onto the internet that purported to be from Sadaam's archives; documents that supposedly gave proof of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection.
Assrocket (from the pissant blog Powerline) as well as
Investors Business Daily zeroed in on one particular document, calling it "a manual for Saddam's spy service". Problem was, the first page is in arabic and the rest was written by the Federation of American Scientists back in 1997.
The mystery was, what did the arabic say? Was it the Iraqi spy agency saying "wow, they sure fingered us but good"?
Arabic translation by Juan Cole on the flip...
I emailed Juan and asked him what was up with the arabic, and he kindly just put
the following on his website:
Maha at Daily Kos has it right. It is falling down funny. The Right blogosphere is going crazy about this document [ pdf] in the Iraqi documents made available by the US government this week.
The notorious liar, Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard led the charge. This is just an old Western document posted to the internet in 1997.
What does the Arabic say?
"The Institutions of the Apparaatus of the Intelligence Service on the Internet:
You will find enclosed information on the Apparatus that have been published on the internet. It has information on our organization, but it is clear that the information is relatively old. Otherwise, it does not do more than mention some correct and important matters . . ."
It then goes on to list the names of some agents. As an intelligence service, its main concern was with cover, apparently.
So Iraqi intelligence is just saying that the information is old news :-) That's what all the shouting is about? You might want to reconsider taking investment advice from IBD, if this is representative of their "intelligence".
Go over to Juan's site and read the whole thing (it's not long). He concludes with:
Yeah, that's a find, all right. Kind of makes the whole last three years worthwhile, all by itself.
Sounds like the neocons are "in their last throes" of desperation and deception.
To see Juan Cole in action, you can check out my interview with him at http://RealityBasedTV.com