The US government is making public a huge trove of documents seized during the invasion of Iraq, posting them on the Internet in a step that is at once a nod to the Web's power and an admission that US intelligence resources are overloaded.
Republican leaders in Congress pushed for the release, which was first proposed by conservative commentators and bloggers hoping to find evidence about the fate of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, or possible links to terror groups.
The Web surfers have begun posting translations and comments, digging through the documents with gusto. The idea of the government turning over a massive database to volunteers is revolutionary -- and not only to them.
"Let's unleash the power of the Internet on these documents," said House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra. "I don't know if there's a smoking gun on WMD or not. But it will give us a better understanding of what was going on in Iraq before the war."
The documents' value is uncertain -- intelligence officials say that they are giving each one a quick review to remove anything sensitive. Skeptics of the war, suspicious of the Bush administration, believe that means the postings are either useless or cherry-picked to bolster arguments for the war.
The documents -- Iraqi memos, training guides, reports, transcripts of conversations, audiotapes and videotapes -- have spurred a flurry of news reports. The Associated Press, for instance, reported on memos from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 1987 ordering plans for a chemical attack on Kurds and comments from him and his aides in the 1990s, searching for ways to prove they didn't have weapons.
Hoekstra said it took months of arguing with intelligence officials before he and Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte agreed to make the documents public. None contain current information about the Iraqi insurgency, and US intelligence officials say they are focusing their limited resources on learning about what's happening on the ground now.
There are up to 55,000 boxes, with possibly millions of pages. The documents are being posted a few at a time -- so far, about 600 -- on a Pentagon Web site, often in Arabic with an English summary.
Regardless of what they reveal, open-government advocates like the decision to make them available.
It's a "radical notion," said Steve Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists government secrecy project, which tracks work by US intelligence agencies.
That "members of the public could contribute to the intelligence analysis process ... That is a bold innovation," he said.
Champions of the Internet as a "citizen's media" have embraced the step. But some remain doubtful, suspecting that the administration only releases information that puts President George W. Bush and his arguments for war in a good light.
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