U.S. Reveals Once-Secret Files From Hussein Regime
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration took the unusual step Thursday of releasing documents seized from Saddam Hussein's government during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, giving the public access to previously secret files that Republicans hope will shore up support for the war.
The documents, posted on a U.S. military website accessible to the public, included photos of Al Qaeda operatives suspected of hiding in northern Iraq, examples of instructions for assembling explosives and other files seized from the vaults of Iraq's notorious intelligence service.
Nevertheless, the documents do not appear to offer any new evidence of illicit activity by Hussein, or hint at preparations for the insurgency that followed the invasion.
The nine files posted Thursday are among hundreds that could be released in the coming months as part of a program being supervised by Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.
A spokeswoman for Negroponte said the government would be releasing new sets of files on a regular basis, after they had been reviewed to make sure their release posed no risk to national security or to individuals identified in the materials.
Experts described the document release as a novel approach to handling intelligence materials, but voiced skepticism that it would lead to broader efforts to use the Internet to tap the expertise of scholars outside the government.
"It has the potential to be a kind of experiment in intelligence policy," said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists who is an advocate for greater declassification of U.S. intelligence records. But Aftergood said there was political pressure in this case and an incentive for the Bush administration to cooperate.
"It looks like an effort to discover a retrospective justification for the war in Iraq," Aftergood said.
"If they can find a document linking Saddam and [weapons of mass destruction] or acts of terrorism, they will then be able to say, 'You see, it was not a big mistake.' "
Aftergood's organization appears in one of the Iraqi documents, apparently because the federation published a chart of Iraq's intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, on its website.
