Welcome Wonkette Readers! you may want to check out this post as well, since it discusses how America helped Iran get their nuclear bomb design.

We are beginning to see, through the dogged efforts of Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard, that connections between Saddam and Terrorists, and yes Al Qaeda, were deep and extensive. First we have the Newsweek list of numerous meetings between Iraq and Al Qaeda officials over a decade.

Today Stephen Hayes continues his efforts to discover what information is hidden inside all the information we captured in Afghanistan and Iraq:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

The secret training took place primarily at three camps–in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak–and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis.

Surprisingly, this is the tip of the information iceberg:

Nearly three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, only 50,000 of these 2 million “exploitable items” have been thoroughly examined. That’s 2.5 percent. Despite the hard work of the individuals assigned to the “DOCEX” project, the process is not moving quickly enough, says Michael Tanji, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who helped lead the document exploitation effort for 18 months. “At this rate,” he says, “if we continue to approach DOCEX in a linear fashion, our great-grandchildren will still be sorting through this stuff.”

The new idea is to unleash these documents on the public (and of course that would include the Blogosphere) to let thousands of independent people sift through the information and pull out the gems.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has convened several meetings in recent weeks to discuss the Pentagon’s role in expediting the release of this information. According to several sources familiar with his thinking, Rumsfeld is pushing aggressively for a massive dump of the captured documents. “He has a sense that public vetting of this information is likely to be as good an astringent as any other process we could develop,” says Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita.

The big, legitimate concern is that anti Bush whacko’s will selectively pick information and create a false impression about Saddam and terrorists in general. While I agree they will do this (BDS is strong in these people), the fact the blogosphere will obviously devour this information will likely counter the propagandists. While we in the blogosphere come from all parts of the political spectrum, I think in the end we generate a good assessment of the reality of a situation.

Rumsfeld seems ready to dump this into the Blogosphere and see what we churn out.

So, unleash the Blogosphere! With that many documents we will be busy for years.

Michelle has begun her round up on this subject here.