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March 17, 2006
Israel and the Iraq Document Dump
So now the US government is enlisting the aid of translators across the world by opening up captured Iraqi government files to the public. It's a welcome move in distributed intelligence analysis. Go blogosphere!
There are around 2 million documents from the Saddam regime that have not been translated. The reason cited was a shortage of American translators.
But surely our ally with the strongest Arabic-translation intelligence department is Israel. Have we been allowing Israel access to these documents up to now? Hopefully we have, but if that's the case, then why do we still have so many documents left unread?
I did a quick calculation and, assuming one hour per document, a team of around 300 translators would take about 2 years to go through 2 million items. Surely, between the US and Israel -- not to mention Britain -- we can find 300 Arabic-readers with security clearance. But then security clearance can't even be the issue, because now we're releasing them to the general public.
Don't get me wrong. I think the public release of all this raw information is a wonderful thing. It's easiest for an electorate to learn from history and to make informed choices for the future when there is access to primary source material. I just can't understand how the contents of these documents can be as unknown as is being suggested.
For further reading, see Michelle Malkin, more Michelle Malkin, and Power Line.
Posted by Dave at March 17, 2006 10:34 PM
