Check it out. Don’t be put off by the fact that the first page is in Arabic; the remaining seven are not. Notice anything odd about it? Well, one might ask: what’s that big “FAS” banner at the top? Wouldn’t any official Iraqi document be in Arabic, not English? And when you get the the bottom, the mystery deepens: you are actually asked to join “FAS”, whatever it is. Luckily, there’s a helpful url: if you type it into your browser, you get here, where all is revealed: you’ve reached the very document you were just looking at, and it turns out to be not a top-secret Iraqi intelligence file, but a public web page about Iraq from the Federation of American Scientists!

So the Federation of American Scientists gave Saddam’s Mukhabarat its “marching orders”. Who knew?

You can find a list of the FAS’ top secret publicly available sources on the web page, as well.Iraqi intelligence notes the appearance of the document on the internet in 1997, and laments that it is very basic ['does not do more than'] and then notes with some amusement how out of date it is (with the implication that Western intelligence on Iraq must be pretty bad). The “out of date” comment probably refers to the Western document’s preoccupation with WMD, which Iraqi Intelligence would have known was gone by then.

The New York Times piece on the Iraqi documents brought this bit of analysis to my attention:

On his blog last week, Ray Robison, a former Army officer from Alabama, quoted a document reporting a supposed scheme to put anthrax into American leaflets dropped in Iraq and declared: “Saddam’s W.M.D. and terrorist connections all proven in one document!!!”

The Times reporter notes that “the anthrax document that intrigued Mr. Robison, the Alabama blogger, does not seem to prove much. It is a message from the Quds Army, a regional militia created by Mr. Hussein, to Iraqi military intelligence that passes on reports picked up by troops, possibly from the radio, since the information is labeled “open source” and “impaired broadcast.”

All true. But I noticed something else. The English translation does indeed say “impaired broadcast,” but the Arabic original says “itha’a sawa.”

Which could mean “impaired broadcast”, I suppose, but also sounds an awful lot like… Radio Sawa. Which is, of course, the name of the American government run Arabic language radio station which began broadcasting in 2002. Which could, hilariously enough, mean that the al-Quds Division document was actually reporting propaganda picked up from an American radio station. Which an enthusiastic conservative blogger then, in turn, embraced as evidence. In a word, blowback!