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FINALLY. For much of the past week, the White House has been engaged in an aggressive effort to defend the case for war in Iraq. Thus far, it has mainly pointed out the obvious: In the months and years before the invasion, many of those who now accuse the White House of misleading the country to war themselves were making precisely the same claims about the threat from Iraq as the Bush administration.President George W. Bush accused his critics of "rewriting history." Vice President Dick Cheney called the attacks a low point of his three decades in public life. Defense...

WHEN SENATOR CARL LEVIN REQUESTED the partial declassification of a Defense Intelligence Agency report in mid-October, the response was swift: He had it in his hands in eight days, reports the New York Times. If only I were a senator. For two years, I have been working to obtain copies of unclassified documents discovered in postwar Iraq. My reasoning is simple: If we understand what the Iraqi regime was doing in the months and years before the war, we will be better able to assess the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, perhaps, to better understand the...

<p>WHEN SENATOR CARL LEVIN REQUESTED the partial declassification of a Defense Intelligence Agency report in mid-October, the response was swift: He had it in his hands in eight days, reports the New York Times. If only I were a senator. For two years, I have been working to obtain copies of unclassified documents discovered in postwar Iraq. My reasoning is simple: If we understand what the Iraqi regime was doing in the months and years before the war, we will be better able to assess the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, perhaps, to better understand the insurgency. It's not a light subject, to be sure. But the quest for the documents, while frustrating, has also been highly amusing. It is a story of bureaucratic incompetence and strategic incoherence. It is also a story--this one not funny at all--about the failure to explain the Iraq war. Two years after I started my pursuit, I'm not much closer to my goal. Why? I have been told countless times by officials of the executive branch that there is no need to reargue the case for war, that what matters now is winning on the ground, that our intelligence professionals don't have time to review history, so occupied are they with current intelligence about current threats. I'm sympathetic to at least part of that thinking; it's hard to insist in the face of new and evolving threats that intelligence analysts should spend their precious time evaluating the past. So if the intelligence professionals don't have time to analyze the papers left behind by Saddam Hussein's government, why not let the press and private-sector scholars do it? Besides, in the end, the notion that the Bush administration doesn't need to continue to make the case for war is shortsighted. Talk to senior American diplomats and military officers in Iraq today and they will tell you that the insurgents closely monitor the debate here in the United States. As domestic support for the war dwindles, the insurgents increasingly believe they can win; they fight harder, they raise more money, they gain new recruits. If these U.S. officials are correct, then continuing to make the case for war in Iraq--to remind people with specifics, not platitudes, why we're fighting--is not a distraction but a central component of fighting to win. Talk to Sen. John McCain, who urges "a renewed effort to win the homefront," lest we lose sight of this fact: "Success or failure in Iraq is the transcendent issue for our foreign policy and our national security, for now and years to come." Said McCain, speaking at the American Enterprise Institute last week, "A renewed effort at home starts with explaining precisely what is at stake in this war--not to alarm Americans, but so that they see the nature of this struggle for what it is. The president cannot do this alone." I DON'T REMEMBER when I first heard about the project in Doha, Qatar, but I do remember that I was very interested in learning more about it. The effort, led by Central Command with assistance from the Defense Intelligence Agency, is reviewing the detritus of the former Iraqi regime: videotapes, photographs, and many, many documents. One aspect of the effort is something called "Doc-Ex," short for document exploitation. Several intelligence analysts, together with several dozen translators, most of them from Jordan, are sifting through millions of pages of documents unearthed in Iraq after the toppling of the regime.</p>

Matthews, after a commercial break: "Welcome back to Hardball. More now on our special report on how the Bush administration sold the war in Iraq, with Stephen Hayes, a senior writer for The Weekly Standard, who has reported extensively on the Iraq War, and Chuck Todd, editor-in-chief of The Hotline. What did you two guys make of the Vice President of the United States denying to Gloria Borger that he had made that claim that there was a connection, a meeting in Prague between intelligence officials of the Iraqi government, at the time, and Mohammed Atta, and then saying he...

WHEN SENATOR CARL LEVIN REQUESTED the partial declassification of a Defense Intelligence Agency report in mid-October, the response was swift: He had it in his hands in eight days, reports the New York Times. If only I were a senator. For two years, I have been working to obtain copies of unclassified documents discovered in postwar Iraq. My reasoning is simple: If we understand what the Iraqi regime was doing in the months and years before the war, we will be better able to assess the nature of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, perhaps, to better understand the...

LAST TUESDAY, Senate Democrats fired the opening shot in the coming battle over prewar intelligence on Iraq when Minority Leader Harry Reid took the Senate into a closed session. The offensive began in earnest this weekend with a New York Times article:  A high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document. The document, an intelligence report from...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...

THE PRESIDENT mulls a strike against Iraq, which he calls an "outlaw nation" in league with an "unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers and organized international criminals." The talk among world leaders, however, focuses on diplomacy. France, Russia, China, and most Arab nations oppose military action. The Saudis balk at giving us overflight rights. U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan prepares a last-ditch attempt to convince Saddam Hussein to abide by the U.N. resolutions he agreed to at the end of the Gulf War. Administration rhetoric could hardly be stronger. The president asks the nation to consider this question: What if...

AS THE WAR with Saddam's Iraq approached, a small group of terrorists in Kurdish-controlled Iraq garnered a significant amount of news coverage. Senior-level Bush administration officials had claimed that this group, Ansar al Islam, represented a key link between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda. There was evidence, after all, that Saddam's intelligence operatives funded and supplied the al Qaeda terrorists who joined this group's ranks in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan. That evidence was hotly contested for months until the story of Ansar al Islam gradually receded from the headlines. Today, the group is hardly even mentioned--if at...

A special report on the new evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda. "In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars." U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba FOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime's ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary...

"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."  U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, CubaFOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime's ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary that the commission had found no evidence "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or...

A CNN anchor gets Iraq and al Qaeda wrong. But will the network issue a correction? "There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected in any way to al Qaeda." So declared CNN Anchor Carol Costello in an interview yesterday with Representative Robin Hayes (no relation) from North Carolina. Hayes politely challenged her claim. "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but you're mistaken. There's evidence everywhere. We get access to it. Unfortunately, others don't." CNN played the exchange throughout the day. At one point, anchor Daryn Kagan even seemed to correct Rep. Hayes after replaying the clip. "And according to the record,...

* Iraqi defectors had been saying for years that Saddam's regime trained "non-Iraqi Arab terrorists" at a camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. U.N. inspectors had confirmed the camp's existence, including the presence of a Boeing 707. Defectors say the plane was used to train hijackers; the Iraqi regime said it was used in counterterrorism training. Sabah Khodada, a captain in the Iraqi Army, worked at Salman Pak. In October 2001, he told PBS's "Frontline" about what went on there. "Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public...

IT WAS ONLY 7:15 a.m. on October 26, 2003, and Paul Wolfowitz was already thinking about Saddam Hussein. The deputy secretary of defense had been awake for just over an hour when he and two civilian Pentagon advisers walked into a large office for a briefing on electricity.Wolfowitz wasn't happy. The office was in one of Saddam's opulent palaces. Six months after the fall of Baghdad, there were still three-story busts of the former Iraqi leader perched atop the four corners of the massive structure. Virtually all of the images of the deposed dictator throughout Iraq had been defaced or...

SAMIR VINCENT WAS VISITING BAGHDAD when Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. He had not lived in his native Iraq for some three decades, having left in 1958 for the United States and a track-and-field career that would later land him in the Boston College Athletic Hall of Fame. Maybe Vincent's presence in Iraq was simply bad timing.Although Americans were not exactly hostages in the tense days after the invasion, they were not free to leave Iraq. So when Vincent, a naturalized citizen, and Illinois businessman Michael Saba managed to escape by taking a taxicab...

An old CIA hand, still with the agency, recently told NewsMax to read an article by Stephen Hayes for the Weekly Standard. Story Continues Below This story, our friend said, explains what is going on at the CIA. The agency's new director, Porter Goss, has stirred up a hornets' nest - make that a vipers' nest - at the nation's chief intelligence agency. For starters he has dared to take steps to plug the flood of leaks gushing out of the company's headquarters in Langley, Va. We figured Goss must have been doing something good when the main recipients of...

ON NOVEMBER 5, 2004, a top aide to new CIA Director Porter Goss warned the associate deputy director of counterintelligence about unauthorized leaks to the media. It was an admonition that might be considered unnecessary: secrecy is a hallmark of the agency and, in any case, such leaks are often against the law. But several officials bristled at the forewarning and after a series of confrontations the deputy director of Operations, Stephen R. Kappes, offered his resignation as a protest. How do we know about all of this? The details were leaked and appeared Saturday on the front page of...

The failed media effort to oust George W. Bush. "WE'D RATHER be last than wrong." So said Dan Rather anchoring election night coverage for CBS. He was apparently serious. That he could say this with a straight face only weeks after presenting the world with forged documents to bring down the president should cement his reputation as the least trusted man in America. Dan Rather is just a small part of a much bigger story. His careless reporting and, later, dogmatic defense of his errors were but one episode in the media's long offensive against George W. Bush.The assault began...

The Kerry campaign's extraordinary response to the newly released tape from al Qaeda's leader.IN THEIR FORMAL STATEMENTS reacting to the new videotape from Osama bin Laden, both President Bush and John Kerry were statesmanlike. Each man called for Americans to unite against terror and vowed to defeat bin Laden and al Qaeda.The Bush campaign wisely avoided going political. But the Kerry campaign--in comments from a top adviser and the candidate himself--did not.Kerry gave what appear to be his first extemporaneous comments about the tape in a previously scheduled satellite interview with Kathy Mykleby, a veteran anchor with WISN TV in...

Politicizing The Bin Laden Tape: The Kerry campaign's extraordinary response to the newly released tape from al Qaeda's leader. by William Kristol and Stephen F. Hayes 10/29/2004 9:30:00 PM IN THEIR FORMAL STATEMENTS reacting to the new videotape from Osama bin Laden, both President Bush and John Kerry were statesmanlike. Each man called for Americans to unite against terror and vowed to defeat bin Laden and al Qaeda. The Bush campaign wisely avoided going political. But the Kerry campaign--in comments from a top adviser and the candidate himself--did not. Kerry gave what appear to be his first extemporaneous comments about...