Hoekstra and Santorum to intelligence community: Declassify more WMD-related documents, and quit downplaying them

Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) have an opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal asking the intelligence community why they are downplaying last week’s announcement by Hoekstra and Santorum that 500 weapons munitions containing degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent which, even in their condition, remain hazardous and lethal if fallen into the wrong hands, have been found since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They are also pleading with them to declassify more of the document in question, as well as other documents they think are vital for the American people to know about regarding what WMD and documents related to it have been found in Iraq:

This latest information should not be new. It should have been brought to public attention by officials in the intelligence community. Instead, it had to be pried out of them. Mr. Santorum wrote to John DeFreitas, commanding general, U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command, on April 12, asking to see the report. He wrote, “I am informed that there may well be many more stores of WMDs throughout Iraq,” and added, “the people of Pennsylvania and Members of Congress would benefit from reviewing this report.” He asked that the “NGIC work with the appropriate entities” to declassify as much of the information as possible.

The senator received no response. On June 5, he wrote again, this time to John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, “concerning captured Iraqi documents, data, media and maps from the regime of Saddam Hussein.” He mentioned his disappointment that many captured Iraqi documents had been classified, and that he still had received no response from Gen. DeFreitas. Some 10 days later, still with no response, he shared his dismay with one of us, Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Permanent Committee on Intelligence, who on June 15 wrote to Mr. Negroponte, urging him to declassify the NGIC analytic piece. Mr. Hoekstra was also dismayed because he had not been informed through normal intelligence channels of the existence of this report.

To compound matters, during a call-in briefing with journalists held at noon on June 21, intelligence officials misleadingly said that “on June 19, we received a second request; this time asking that we, in short order–48 hours–declassify the key points, which are sort of the equivalent to key judgments from something like a National Intelligence Estimate, from the assessment.” The fault was their own; we had been requesting this information for nine weeks and they had not acted.

On Thursday, Mr. Negroponte’s office arranged a press briefing by unnamed intelligence officials to downplay the significance of the report, calling it “not new news” even as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was reiterating the obvious importance of the information: “What has been announced is accurate, that there have been hundreds of canisters or weapons of various types found that either currently have sarin in them or had sarin in them, and sarin is dangerous. And it’s dangerous to our forces. . . . They are weapons of mass destruction. They are harmful to human beings. And they have been found. . . . And they are still being found and discovered.”

In fact, the public knows relatively little about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Indeed, we do not even know what is known or unknown. Charles Duelfer, former head of the Iraq Survey Group, stated that the ISG had fully evaluated less than 0.25% of the more than 10,000 weapons caches known to exist throughout Iraq. It follows that the American people should be brought up to date frequently on our state of knowledge of this important matter. That is why we asked that the entire document be declassified, minus the exact sources, methods and locations. It is also, in part, why we have fought for the declassification of hundreds of thousands of Saddam-era documents.

Read the whole thing.

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