DoD releases documents seized in Iraq

This week, the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office released a number of documents seized during Operation Iraqi Freedom. [Foreign Military Studies Office] The Boston Globe's article on the documents does an excellent job of explaining how the American intelligence community can harness the power of the internet by releasing information:

"Goaded by Congress, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte has begun to release millions of pages of captured files online in an unprecedented effort to harness the Internet to disseminate raw intelligence material. There, anybody with a knowledge of Arabic can download the files and translate them for the world.

It's the same 'open source' principle that drove the successful development of the Internet and of powerful free software like the Linux operating system. Instead of hiring a team of brilliant professionals to analyze Iraqi documents in secret, the open source systems will use hundreds of clever amateurs, who'll publish their work for anyone to analyze and improve upon.

'Workers control the means of production, but without all that tedious communism,' said Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and author of An Army of Davids, a book that shows how the Internet encourages public activism. US intelligence officials say nearly all the documents released have been given at least a cursory reading by Arabic experts. Beth Marple, Negroponte's deputy press secretary, said amateur translators won't find any major surprises, such as proof Hussein hid stockpiles of chemical weapons." [Boston Globe]

Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents [Foreign Military Studies Office]
ABC News has also provided analysis of a few of the documents: "New Documents from Saddam Hussein's Archives Discuss Bin Laden, WMDs" [ABC News]