US puts seized Iraq documents on the web
All in Arabic, the first nine documents released for public viewing on a US Army website appeared to be official papers and letters of the Saddam Hussein regime, some of them from Iraqi intelligence.
According to the website, some of the documents discuss the presence of the terrorist network Al-Qaeda in Iraq, explosive materials and dealing with the United Nations weapons inspection team.
The documents are the first to be released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the top US intelligence co-ordinator, in hopes that the public will help sort through some 48,000 cases of documents collected in the invasion.
"There are documents that have never been translated," said Representative Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has lobbied for the documents’ release.
"The folks in the intelligence community need to be focused on current action, they don’t have the time and energy to review documents that are three to 15 years old," he said. "We’re hoping to unleash the power of the blogosphere," he said, referring to the huge online community of weblog operators.
Another US legislator, Senator Rick Santorum, called the documents "increasingly necessary to help the American people understand both the reasons for our involvement in Iraq and the challenge of defending freedom and democracy."
The documents can be seen under "document exploitation" at the website http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm . On the same site is a series of English translations of al-Qaeda documents released in February.
The website declares the US government has not determined the authenticity of the documents, their validity or factual accuracy, or the quality of any translations.
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