FMSO Docex coming back to the forefront

Somehow the FMSO Docex project was successfully pushed to the back burner for a few months. There is a story on FoxNews.com about the project where a huge amount of documents confiscated in Iraq shortly after Baghdad fell. The military found there were simply too many documents for their manpower to translate in our lifetime, so certain members of Congress pushed to have the untranlated documents released to public. The originals were scanned and made available for public translation. Those that have been translated are on the FMSO Docex website.

The interesting thing about this story is the deafening silence from both sides on the subject. While I can see conservatives being somewhat cautious, you might expect the liberals to at least make some statement on the subject. Maybe they have, but I have yet to see anything substantive. Yes, there was some initial coverage (remember the famous "Editor's Note" basically cautioning against trusting them too much). There was some initial discussion on the conservative talk shows and a couple blogs.

The documents I have seen seem to reveal some very damning evidence against Saddam. So much so, that you would expect the right to be trumpeting them and the left to be heartily denouncing them and demanding investigations into potential fraud or what have you. My guess is that the right is waiting for the best moment to make a push. After all, with this volume of documentation it would be nearly impossible to pull off a forgery of this magnitude without getting caught. The orginal Arabic is included, so it would be difficult to have egregious mistranslations without challenge. My take on the liberal silence is that they are whistling past the graveyard, counting on the shortness of people's attention span and trusting in their "Bush lied" massive propoganda campaign the media has helped them with. Time will tell.