The Saddam Dossier

Allow me to crow a bit this morning, as I'm extremely proud of and happy for Ray Robinson, who comments occasionally here at Confederate Yankee and helped me out immensely with his technical expertise in a series of posts debunking the "white phosphorus is a chemical weapon" myth of last November.

Ray went on to establish his own blog in March, and now has a new column at FoxNews.com, called "The Saddam Dossier."

What does Fox News plan to accomplish with this series?

Was Saddam Hussein a security threat to the United States? Did the Iraqi dictator have connections to Al Qaeda or other terrorist ties? What happened to the weapons of mass destruction everyone believed were in his possession? Did Saddam move them? Did they ever exist?

All of those questions have been dogging President George W. Bush and his administration since the start of the Iraq war. Politicians and respected U.S. military and intelligence officials have weighed in publicly on both sides of the debate, but until recently the general public has had little of the information necessary to make a fully informed decision on its own.

But that is changing.

The U.S. government seized thousands of classified Iraqi government papers when Saddam's regime was toppled, and Washington recently released a trove of these documents on the Pentagon's Foreign Military Studies Office Web site.

The documents, many in Arabic and with no accompanying translation, provide multiple insights into events inside pre-war Iraq. The dossier, however, is huge and disorganized. Digging out its secrets is a laborious task — one that the U.S. government decided to leave to others.

[snip]

With a small cadre of independent translators to support his efforts, Robison will now translate and analyze scores of the unexplored trove of documents from Saddam's regime in a FOXNews.com exclusive series: The Saddam Dossier.

In addition to translation, Robison will provide analysis based upon his work for the Iraq Survey Group and his military operations research experience. On occasion, he or a translator will remark in the translation itself for clarity, but will maintain the integrity of the document. All of their work will be linked online to the original Arabic texts, stored on the Foreign Military Studies Office Web site. Robison's analysis, however, is based on his own opinions.

"It is my belief," Robison says, "that those who just want to know the truth will find new and shocking information in these documents and may even change their beliefs about the reasons for the war."

The first installment of "The Saddam Dossier," Terror Links to Saddam's Inner Circle is online, and examines documents that connect Saddam's Iraq with the Taliban.

The much vaunted liberal cry of "Bush Lied, People Died" has never been so threatened.