US releases confiscated prewar Iraqi documents

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has released prewar Iraqi government documents confiscated by US forces, including some it said showed Saddam Hussein's regime suspected an al Qaeda presence in the country.

Nine sets of documents, released by the office of US intelligence chief John Negroponte and posted to an Army website, are the first to be publicly released from a huge cache of materials confiscated by US forces in Iraq.

The collection is comprised of 48,000 boxes of papers and tape-recorded conversations, including many involving Saddam himself, officials said.

Also released were 29 sets of al Qaeda-related documents that were the subject of a separate study by the US Military Academy at West Point, officials said.

Negroponte's office, under pressure from conservatives including Republican lawmakers, decided in recent days to set up a process for the material's release, which is expected to take months.

The material, housed in Qatar, has already been examined by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group and continues to be scrutinized by the US military for intelligence that could be acted upon.

Republican lawmakers say the data could still address US claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and had ties with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

Both allegations helped justify a war that has become increasingly unpopular in a mid-term election year that has Republicans in Congress feeling vulnerable.

But no WMD have been located in Iraq and independent investigators have found no evidence that Saddam had a collaborative relationship with al Qaeda.

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Republicans who lobbied for the data's release, said it was important that the information be made available quickly to the public, including political "blogs."

"We're hoping to unleash the power of the internet, unleash the power of the blogosphere, to get through these documents and give us a better understanding of what was going on in Iraq before the war," said Hoekstra, chairman of the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Hoekstra said the US government would have linguists and intelligence analysts comb through the material to determine what information could be released.

The website said the government had not determined the authenticity of the documents, their accuracy or the quality of any translations.

Many documents had not been translated from Arabic, but the release included English-language synopses.

One synopsis described a series of Iraqi documents as "Iraqi intelligence correspondence concerning the presence of al Qaeda members in Iraq," adding there were exchanges between intelligence service members about a suspicion that was later confirmed of the presence of an al Qaeda group in the country.

- REUTERS