Prewar Iraqi documents

It seems that Congressmen are having trouble getting copies of unclassified pre-war Iraqi documents from our intelligence agencies. And only a small fraction of the captured documents have really been looked at.

To date, some 50,000 of the 2 million "exploitable items" in the possession of the U.S. government have been examined by U.S. intelligence analysts, many of them only for their relevance to the search for weapons of mass destruction. (The numbers are the best guesses of several officials who have worked on the document exploitation project.) There remain, then, approximately 1,950,000 items whose contents are unknown to anyone in the U.S. government.

Some governmental officials don't see any urgency in examining these documents. After all, they're from a dead regime. However, a large number of these documents are known to contain, in general terms:

Among the vast intelligence take are boxes and boxes of files captured from the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. According to U.S. officials familiar with them, the Iraqi Intelligence documents include detailed personnel files of Iraqi intelligence officers and operatives. While some of these files have been exploited, many of them have not. It is a safe bet that today some of these Iraqis are coordinating the insurgency. Our failure to exploit the materials we have almost suggests we do not want to know all we can about the "terrorists and insurgents who oppose the birth of a new democracy."

But if the intelligence agencies aren't that concerned about the contents of those documents, then maybe we should put them up on the Internet, and let interested historians have access to them.

They might find something.