Osama and Saddam Were Partners? Who Cares?

That's the attitude the New York Times and the CIA hope you'll take once more Iraqi Intelligence Service documents are released, if ever:

IN THE WAKE OF the New York Times's November surprise, the government's release of documents captured in Iraq has come to a grinding halt. For more than one week now, the site that had published files from Saddam's archives has been offline. Unfortunately, there is a good chance that the document release project, which had published thousands of documents and other pieces of captured media since March, will never be restarted.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Peter Hoekstra has long been a champion of releasing the materials captured in Iraq, as long as they did not jeopardize national security. He had to fight a thoroughly disinterested intelligence bureaucracy to jump-start the project. But Tuesday's election results mean that Hoekstra will no longer be positioned to carry on the fight. Within just a few months he will lose his chairmanship to a Democratic replacement, who will most likely have little interest in exposing Saddam's crimes. Instead, the Committee will likely focus more attention on the Bush administration's supposed prewar intelligence abuses.

That's a shame. The documents and other captured media provide a unique window into one of the most secretive regimes in history. As a general rule, Saddam's minions did not advertise their misdeeds in public. The documents and other files released on the Internet, therefore, provided one of the best sources for exploring what the Butcher of Baghdad was really up to during his decades-long rein of terror.

But the captured materials are valuable for a variety of other reasons,
not the least of which is intelligence reform. For too long, the U.S. Intelligence Community has been content in its failure to recruit human intelligence assets among our enemies. As a result, IC operatives and analysts frequently filled gaps in their knowledge with simple-minded assumptions. The Iraqi intelligence documents provide numerous examples of just how wrong-headed these assumptions can be and the necessity of good human intelligence (HUMINT) collection.

Take the issue of Iraq's contacts with al Qaeda. No informed observer disputes that the Iraqi regime was in contact with al Qaeda operatives. But the conventional wisdom inside the CIA is that these contacts did not amount to much. This judgment is not based on a deep knowledge of either al Qaeda or the Iraqi regime. The CIA failed to recruit significant assets inside either. Instead, it is based on an assumption.

But the "realists" all know that Sunnis and Shi'ites would never, ever work together---right?