When Dems are playing tricks with national security matters.The Washington Post's Walter Pincus is our first clue that the game is on.

Lawmakers Want More Data On Contracting Out Intelligence

Congress is taking its first steps to oversee the Defense Department's rapidly growing activities in the foreign and domestic intelligence fields, focusing also on the growing practice of contracting out intelligence analysis to former military personnel.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, in its version of the fiscal 2007 intelligence authorization bill, has called for enhanced reporting requirements on the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the Pentagon's newest and fastest—growing intelligence agency.

While the House Armed Services Committee approved an unusually large Pentagon request to increase by 50 the number of supergrade defense intelligence Senior Executive Service personnel, the Senate Armed Services Committee last week ordered expanded reporting on defense contractor employment of former senior Defense Department officials and interagency contracting.

Let me translate Pincus talk. The Dems are fighting the appropriation of funds which would permit the faster translation of thousands of captured documents.

Senator Santorum asked the Chairman of the Intelligence Committee for assistance in this request:

Dear Chairman Stevens and Chairman Roberts,

I write today concerning ongoing efforts to translate and decipher official documents, media and planning documents captured by Coalition Forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

As you may know, the Department of the Army, in partnership with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is in the process of posting these captured documents, diagrams, maps, and audio and video recordings on a website run by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  The documents are part of the ongoing effort, called Project HARMONY, by the U.S. government to exploit information that documents the actions, plans and capabilities of Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence assets inside Iraq.

While there has been some progress to date in the pace of releasing this information to the public, much remains to be done with respect to translating the documents and media captured inside Iraq.  However, there are limitations on the ability of the U.S. government to translate these materials given our shortfall of skilled Arabic linguists.

With this in mind, I ask for your support in authorizing and appropriating $5 million for Fiscal Year 2007 to supplement the U.S. government's ability to translate these captured materials.  Because of security concerns and the sensitivity of the documents to be translated, I ask that there be appropriate safeguards in place to ensure that translating services or contractors have employees with valid security clearances and that the companies have been fully vetted by the Department of Defense or appropriate intelligence agency.

Thank you for your attention to this request.  Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of additional assistance to you.

Sincerely, 

Rick Santorum 

United States Senate 

And each day, it becomes more and more obvious why it is in the interest of the Democrats to keep those documents from seeing the light of day (via Sweetness & Light):

The following is a translation of a newly posted Iraqi document done by an unofficial translator. The document, posted in Arabic, is from a Department Of Defense program.

In the document an Iraqi opposition source working in Syria reports on the movement of Iraqi trucks to Syria before the start of the US invasion of Iraq. It is his understanding that the trucks contained proscribed weapons of mass destruction.

The translation is dated July 13 — probably 2003. But the original document is dated March 14th, 2003. (Moharram 10th is the tenth day of the Muslim New Year, which in 2003 began on March 4th.) The International Coalition Forces attacked Iraq on March 20, 2003.

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