The Bush administration today 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 Web site, are the first to be publicly released from a huge cache of materials confiscated by US forces in Iraq.
The collection encompasses 48,000 boxes of papers and tape-recorded conversations, including many involving Saddam himself, officials said. In recent days, Negroponte's office chose to set up a process for the material's release, which is expected to take months.
Also released today 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.
In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration portrayed Iraq as a threat because of links it said Baghdad had with al-Qaeda, links that have been never been proven to the satisfaction of critics of the administration.
The Web site, http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/products-docex.htm,said the US government has not determined the authenticity of the documents, their factual accuracy or the quality of any translations.
Officials said the material from prewar Iraq has already been reviewed by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group and continues to be scrutinized by the US military for intelligence that could be acted on.
Many documents had not been translated from Arabic. But the release included English-language synopses.