Bob Dreyfuss points out that Chalabi's INC has taken control of a huge archive of secret government materials from Saddam's regime. These materials give Chalabi a huge amount of leverage in the new Iraq both at home and in foreign relations because of the trove of blackmail material this must represent. Dreyfuss argues that Tenet
needs to call up Rumsfeld, tell him to halt the INC payments, then send his spooks into Makiya's documentation center and take those documents, and then publish them all. Somehow, I bet that in those papers, besides evidence of Saddam's torture teams, is some interesting stuff from Iraq's secret service on people like, oh, Ahmad Chalabi and Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Wanna bet?
It occurs to me that there is a genuine pressure point here. Those materials should be under the control of the CPA for two reasons. We are the caretakers of Iraqi sovereignty and we are responsible for Iraqi internal security until the handover later this year.
Not only was it illegitimately to prejudge the outcome of the processes of Iraqi self-governance to deliver these materials to Chalabi's INC but I suspect that this is harming our military's ability to build it's own intelligence for countering the Iraqi insurgency, that we do not directly possess these materials at present.
Could the files collected in Saddam's time yield clues to the current insurgency? Did Saddam's secret police detail networks tribal loyalties? How many American soldiers are dying because we have not had these materials?