What's In Those Secret Iran Documents?

Just when you think the Obama administration can’t get any more contemptuous of the American people, it tops itself:

Scattered around the U.S. Capitol complex are a series of Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilities, or SCIFs, which are typically used to hold Top Secret information. But today in these deeply secure settings are a series of unclassified documents — items dealing with the Iran nuclear deal that are not secret, but that the Obama administration is nevertheless blocking the public from reading.

The Obama administration delivered 18 documents to Congress on July 19, in accordance with legislation requiring a Congressional review of the nuclear deal. Only one of these documents are classified, while the remaining 17 are unclassified. Yet many of these unclassified documents cannot be shared with the public or discussed openly with the press. The protocol for handling these documents, set by the State Department and carried out by Congress, is that these unreleased documents can only be reviewed ‘In Camera’ — a Latin term that means only lawmakers and staffers with secret clearance can read them, held in various Congressional SCIFs.

It’s diabolical, really: hiding unclassified documents in SCIFs:

Most staffers were hesitant to discuss — let alone share — a number of these documents, even though they’re not classified, because they require a secret clearance to view. By mixing a classified document with unclassified documents, critics of this arrangement contend, important facts are being kept from the public just as Congress is deciding whether to support or oppose the Iran deal.

“The unclassified items… should be public. This is going to be the most important foreign policy decisions that this Congress will make,” a Republican Senate aide told The Daily Beast. “This is the administration that once said it would be the most transparent administration in history. They’re not acting like it.”

Hey, fella — we’re nearly seven years into this nightmare now and you haven’t figured out that every word out of the mouth of every administration official is a lie, then you haven’t been paying attention. “Trust us,” just isn’t going to cut it any more, if it ever did.

Meanwhile, over at the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol goads our roundheeleed Republican Congress to demand access to some other important documents regarding the Islamic Republic and its continuing war against America:

The bad news is that the Obama administration doesn’t want us to have all the information available to judge {Iran] and its behavior. The good news is that Congress can insist the information be provided.

Here’s an important instance. We have been told by six current or former intelligence officials that the collection of documents captured in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound includes explosive information on Iran’s relationship with al Qaeda over the past two decades, including details of Iran’s support for al Qaeda’s attacks on Americans. Some of these officials believe this information alone could derail the deal. We haven’t seen it. But the American people should see it all before Congress votes on the deal in September.

The bin Laden documents have long been the subject of a behind-the-scenes battle between the White House and elements of the intelligence community. After an initial scrub of the documents in the months after the May 2011 raid in Abbottabad, the Obama administration let them sit untouched for as long as a year. When officials at the DIA and Central Command requested access to the collection to extract intelligence and provide it to war fighters, they were initially denied. And soon after the team from DIA and CENTCOM was given limited access to the documents, they were ordered to stop their exploitation. What they did see was illuminating.

Among the most significant were documents that shed new light on the complicated relationship between Iran and al Qaeda.

Well… what would he be doing differently?

Highly credible senior intelligence officials who have seen the bin Laden documents say that the collection includes important information about al Qaeda and Iran. The White House has consistently blocked the release of that information. It will take concerted action by the leadership of Congress—in particular, Speaker of the House John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Richard Burr along with Chairman Nunes—to wring this information out of the administration.

Not to demand these documents—not to insist on having access to them despite all the administration’s protestations and obfuscations, not to allow the American people to understand the whole truth about the Iranian regime with which the administration has negotiated this agreement—would be an abdication of responsibility on the part of Congress that history would judge harsh.

Assuming history survives a nuclear attack, that is.