This may be old news to some, but the first I've heard of it came in my local newspaper today (Monday 12 June 2006). No onsite posting as yet.
"The U.S. Army is the process of posting online 48,000 boxes of Arabic-language documents captured by U.S. troops during the war with Iraq. The document dump, which is being done at the request of Sen. Pat Roberts, among others, is an unprecedented experiment in public access. The idea is that thousands of eyes on open records will do a better job of interpreting intelligence than the eyes of a few military experts."
"Started two months ago, the Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal could ultimately offer up to a million documents related to the war and the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein. Nearly all were originally in Arabic, although increasing numbers are being translated into English, some on the site and others by Web-viewers doing translations on their own sites.
And even the English translations aren't for the casual armchair investigator. "Letter from Qusay concerning Kuwaiti POWs being used as human shields" is a typical title. Qusay was one of Saddam Hussein's two sons killed in a shootout in July 2003. Roberts, the head of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, urged the U.S. director of national intelligence last fall to make the documents public."
There's no intelligible name attached to the website URL, although the banner "Operation Iraqui Freedom" appears on the page linked by the newspaper:
I've looked only briefly, and it's possible that the official processing of messages may be "selective," but the concept of making the stuff available is "novel" at least. Some bloggers reportedly have been doing their own translations, and the site may (or not) be of interest later as more stuff gets posted.
Byline as printed in my papers was: BY ALAN BJERGA, Eagle Washington bureau. The story likely is from a Sen Roberts press release, so others may "write" the same words under different names, or it may be that it only appeared locally because Roberts is from KS (?).