Secret intelligence captured during the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound and withheld from the public by the Obama administration must be released, the House intelligence chairman told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
The effort to release the documents revives a debate that the Obama administration sought to shutter. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declared in the administration’s final hours that it was “closing the book” on the bin Laden documents and released a final tranche of 49 files, marking a total of 571. Obama officials and news reports since 2011 have revealed that the actual sum of the documents is enough to fill a “small college library.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes told TWS he is in direct contact with the Trump White House and other agencies about making more of the documents public.
“The last DNI saying that that was all they were going to put out is totally unacceptable,” Nunes said. “You can’t just keep thousands of documents locked down, just because you don’t want them out, that have no significant classified information in them.”
The files are a critical resource for understanding how al Qaeda operates, he said.
“Those documents need to get out, especially as you see the growth of al Qaeda and ISIS,” he continued. “Those documents need to get out for historians to have those records so that we can begin to build a history of what al Qaeda was, what it is today, what they were thinking at the time.”
The Trump White House is open to declassifying the documents, and some in the administration favor doing so quickly, according to multiple national security officials.
Some of the unreleased files contain revelations about ties between al Qaeda and Iran, a relationship at times downplayed by the Obama administration, sources have told TWS.
Nunes championed language in the 2014 Intelligence Authorization Act requiring the DNI to conduct a declassification review of the files, publicly release the declassified documents, and explain to Congress the reasoning for keeping any information classified.
“The DNI did not meet the requirements of the law,” Nunes said. “We’ve informed the administration of that and we’re waiting now to hear back from them.”
The effort comes after years of politicization of the documents by the Obama administration, as THE WEEKLY STANDARD has previously reported. Obama officials used the documents to cement the narrative that al Qaeda is “on the path to defeat,” selectively releasing or citing some files and withholding others altogether:
North Carolina senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had not given enough thought to releasing the documents.
“It’s not something that I’ve thought about,” Burr said. “But clearly the president of the United States has the power to declassify anything at any time, so he can choose to do that.”
Burr was hesitant about members of Congress advocating to make the files public.
“Congress really shouldn’t have a role in declassification of documents,” he said.
“If every member had gone out and read every document, then they could comment on them,” he continued. “But not reading them, I would be the last one who would want to take a position.”
