Senator on Iraq & Document Release

RealClearPolitics has the text of a speech Senator Santorum gave on the Senate floor.

He starts out by talking of progress and of patience, and goes on to the document release efforts...

I suggest there are some things that we are finding out now. Another effort I have been working on in Iraq is the intelligence information we have been able to gather from the former regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has been a project that Congressman Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has been working on--and I have worked with him--to make sure these 48,000 boxes, containing roughly 2 million documents, are released to the American public and the world to determine what was the intelligence assessment and the activity level and, in particular, in Iraq with Saddam, and with his interaction with elements of al-Qaida or other terrorist organizations.

What we are finding is that some of the statements that have been made on the floor and statements that were made just as recently as March 19, 2006 by my colleague from Pennsylvania, Congressman Jack Murtha who said:


There was no terrorism in Iraq before we went there. None. There was no connection with al-Qaida. There was no connection with terrorism in Iraq itself.

Yet if we look at some of the documents that are being released by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte--and, again, only a few hundred of the millions of documents have been released. As a caveat, while Congressman Hoekstra and I are excited about the fact that DNI decided to release these documents, the pace of the release is, let us say, unsatisfactory to this point.