The Iraqi Documents: A Glimpse Into the Regime of Saddam Hussein - 4/6/2006 media files of hearing

US House of Representatives ^ | April 6, 2006: | Dana Rohrabacher, Chairman

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

April 6, 2006:
2:00 p.m., 2172 Rayburn House Office Building
Hearing: The Iraqi Documents:  A Glimpse Into the Regime of Saddam Hussein 

Hearing Notice, The Honorable Dana Rohrabacher, Ibrahim M. Al-Shaheen, Ph.D., Mr. Daniel Butler [no statement], Brigadier General Anthony A. Cucolo III, USA, Lieutenant Colonel Kevin M. Woods, USA (Ret.)

 View Webcast Video

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The video requires realplayer, is two hours plus a bit and has many nuggents .

Am looking for people to listen to the full extent and post their observations on this thread. You will notice mostly democrats attending and much concern regarding the authetication of the documents being released to the public.

Dana think's it is good...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

About an hour and 30 or 40 minutes into this there is some detail about how documents get into the Harmony database and documents that they can recognize as forged are not put into the database....the documents that are being made available to the public are a subset of that ....I think...based on what I heard......need more freepers to listen to the webcast ....be patient....there is some very careful dancing being done....

Berman of California is questioning whether the documents should be released because.....well just listen.....

[hsalaw]

Will listen later and get back to you.

[SE Mom]

Will follow the thread with interest. Wouldn't you THINK some enterprising young reporter would want to make thier name by thoroughly reviewing these docs and doing a series on same?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Be patient,...starts out rather slow....some heavy exchanges between the Demos and Dana at the end.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The Hearing Notice:

**********************************************************************

Committee on International Relations
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, D.C. 20515-0128

Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
Dana Rohrabacher (CA), Chairman

March 30, 2006 

TO:     MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 

You are respectfully requested to attend the following OPEN hearing of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, to be held in Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building: 

DATE:                                        Thursday, April 6, 2006  

TIME:                                          2:00 p.m. 

SUBJECT:                                The Iraqi Documents:  A Glimpse Into the Regime of Saddam Hussein 

WITNESSES:                            Panel I

                                                *** Ibrahim M. Al-Shaheen, Ph.D.
                                                     Deputy Chairman
                                                     The National Committee for Missing & Prisoners of War – Kuwait

                                                     Panel II

                                                     Mr. Daniel Butler
                                                     Senior Advisor to the Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for
                                                         Open Source
                                                     Open Source Center
                                                     Office of the Director of National Intelligence

                                                     Brigadier General Anthony A. Cucolo III, USA
                                                     Director
                                                     Joint Center for Operational Analysis
                                                     United States Joint Forces Command

                                                     Lieutenant Colonel Kevin M. Woods, USA (Ret.)
                                                     Project Leader and Principal Author of Iraqi Perspective Project
                                                     United States Joint Forces Command


***NOTE: Witness list has been changed.

By Direction of the Chairman

The Committee on International Relations seeks to make its facilities accessible to persons with disabilities. If you are in need of special accommodations, please call 202/225-5021 at least four business days in advance of the event, whenever practicable. Questions with regard to special accommodations in general (including availability of Committee materials in alternative formats and assistive listening devices) may be directed to the Committee.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

This Guy maybe the lead guy in setting up the Archive at Fort Leavenworth from which JV has been getting the documents....

************************************************

Mr. Daniel Butler Senior Advisor to the Assistant Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Open Source Open Source Center Office of the Director of National Intelligence

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The second panel...the two military guys plus Butler were really there to talk about the background on their report:

Iraqi Perspective of OIF (Major Combat Operations)
(UNCLASSIFIED)

But they reveal a lot of good stuff it seemed to me....but they are walking on eggshells....

[MizSterious]

I don't have RealPlayer any more (on purpose), but will follow this thread. Pinging a couple of possibly interested parties.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Got some time.....useful background on the Saddam documents.

[FreedomPoster]

>>I don't have RealPlayer any more (on purpose),

Good move, since it's spyware, afaiac.

You might try Real Alternative. It has worked pretty well for me, though I haven't tried to look at this yet.

[Marine_Uncle]

Thanks for the head up on this one. Unfortunatly with my slow 56kb dial up I fear most of the time I will have to wait for packets to be downloaded and receive at best a very choppy video. So I will pass on it.
Hopefully some Freepers can band together and provide us a concice evaluation as to what the content elucidates on principle points.

[avacado]

I just watched the entire. I had to do it in segments over the course of the day. It's long and I wanted to watch all of it.

I'll try and give a write up on it tomorrow. "jveritas" needs to see this. The Pentagon does explain very clearly about the authentication of the documents.

[avacado]

Okay.... the highlights of the oversight committee on "The Iraqi Documents: A Glimpse Into the Regime of Saddam Hussein "

It's a long meeting and things pertaining to the Iraq documents doesn't really get started until about 58 minutes into the video. The beginning is mostly addressing Kuwait prisoners from the first Gulf War.

Finally they introduce the guys from the Pentagon who put out the IPP report. The IPP report consists of 93 translated documents combined with interviews of ex-Iraqi officials -- some in prison, safe houses, or here in the states. The purpose of the IPP report is not for a smoking gun but rather to look into, and study, how and what motivated Saddam and his regime given the new facts of documents and ex-Iraqis. Saddam had Pan-Arab goals to dominate that area and to aggressively go after anything that could,or would, stop him, e.g. the West and in particular the USA.

About 4 people present got to question the guys from the Pentagon. Dana Rohrabacher,the charinperson, did excellent, then next-up was a congressman from Boston (you guessed it, a liberal mooonbat). This clown, instead of asking questions, lectures the guys from the Pentagon. He asked them if they have heard of General Eaton (sp?) and asked what they thought of him. They replied that they had heard of him. The liberal kept asking them what they thought of him. The Pentagon guys were very reserved and really didn't want to answer and then one finally said, "he's a fine military man."

At that point the liberal said, "you bet he is a fine military man and he's a patriot of America and protector of this great nation and highly respected!" Then the liberal goes on to read from General Eaton's book that slams Rumsfeld. This goes on for about 10 minutes and finally the liberal's turn is up. So this moron liberal used all his time, not asking questions, but instead just barking like a moonbat on an unrelated subject.

As to the authentication of the documents in the Harmony database. Yes, they have been verified for forgeries. And if the intelligence service finds forgeries they do NOT make it into the database. The documents are scrubbed in the field for information that is needed for that particular time, then later scrubbed again by intelligence officers either in Quatar or the USA and then scrubbed again before being released. Any fake or forgery that is identified along that way does not make it into the database.

The reason that the document website has the disclaimers of not vouching for the authenticity is not because they may be fake, -- because they aren't -- but because they cannot possibly state whether the contents are true or not. For example, if a document says Saddam purchased 100,000 gallons of water, the Pentagon is not going to state one way or the other if that is true or not, hence, the disclaimer

So the documents being posted are real Iraqi documents that have been scrubbed for forgeries before being loaded into the Harmony database. It's just that the Pentagon is not going to give a 100% guarantee to the contents. Which would be impossible to do anyways.

Hope that helps.

[Allegra]

Wouldn't you THINK some enterprising young reporter would want to make thier name by thoroughly reviewing these docs and doing a series on same?

FReeper jveritas has already done a lot of work on some Saddam documents. I'm pinging him to this thread.

I heard some of the trial today in Arabic off of one of the TVs here and there was some serious screaming and yelling going on. I'll have to catch the English recap of that on Sky News later this evening.

[SE Mom]

I've followed jveritas excellent translations- it's unsettling to realize how little of this news is covered in the MSM.


Keep us posted if there are new developments...

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Excellent summary....thank you so very much.

Rep Berman from California was the light haired guy at the end laying out the very careful questions regarding authentication,....I expect they had a plan to challenge them, probably still will in some fashion later,...

[avacado]

--- Rep Berman from California was the light haired guy at the end laying out the very careful questions regarding authentication,....I expect they had a plan to challenge them, probably still will in some fashion later,...---

He at least asked intelligent questions and that was where most of the valuable information from the Pentagon guys came from during his questioning about authentication.

The other Democrat was a certified barking moonbat. He had no questions and just barked about the Iraq War and Rumsfeld being failures. He had no business being there for that meeting. He was totaly useless to the context of the meeting - but that's expected from a moonbat.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

See avacado 's quick summary at post #14....

Still need more eyes on the full 2 hours..... One thing I was interested in was the statement from the Military panel that TOTALLY VERIFIES that Saddam was training TERRORISTS ...Iraqi and foreign.... however the Military guys were VERY CAREFUL NOT to draw the connection between any Al-Queda terrorists....then one of the democrats made a comment about Wahabbis...and things got quiet....lots of body language if you get my drift.....

[Marine_Uncle]

Well Ernest. I started to work at Home Depot and with having found a job, tis been a long time..., and going to weekend two day orientation classes, have been out of the loop a bit.
But I decided to give the video tape a shot. I watched the entire thing.
One thing that clearly stands out for anyone watching it will most likely be the political nature of the sub committee. Dana tried to keep things a bit in balance I believe, but the demorats obviously where not to give an inch on any disclosures that pointed to say, Saddam's regime training of terrorist groups. The demorats cannot afford to allow people to start thinking more clearly on the reasons we went to war with Iraq.
I was surprised the video worked well with my low bandwidth connections. Usually such is not the case.
Please do not feel you must respond at this point. Perhaps if you posted during the week on this one more folks would have responded. But, surely we shall see a lot more coming out of the Harmony Database in the days to come. And as that happens and word spreads, more folks may better understand taking Saddam out was not a debatable issue. It had to be done. That is of course for those that have the ability to view the over all picture, and think outside the box.