The US has begun to post online documents seized during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
With this US hopes to tap into "the power of the blogosphere" to help analyse the documents for the US "war on terror".
All in Arabic, the first nine documents released for public viewing on a US Army website on Thursday 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 UN weapons inspection team.
The documents are the first to be released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the top US intelligence coordinator, 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 focussed on current action, they don't have the time and energy to review documents that are three to 15 years old," he said.
{{/usCountry}}"The folks in the intelligence community need to be focussed on current action, they don't have the time and energy to review documents that are three to 15 years old," he said.
{{/usCountry}}"We're hoping to unleash the power of the blogosphere," he said, referring to the huge online community of weblog operators.