Stephen F. Hayes has a fantastic article in the latest Weekly Standard about the documents captured in Iraq that indicate that Saddam was in the business of training Islamic terrorists in the years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion. Hayes reports that intelligence officials believe there could be a lot more useful intelligence in the thousands of documents they’ve brought back from Afghanistan and Iraq, but they can’t translate them fast enough. One idea they had for expediting the processing of the information is to make the documents public. But as Hayes reports, there is a particular fear that’s keeping them from releasing the documents:

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 main worry, says DiRita, is that the mainstream press might cherry-pick documents and mischaracterize their meaning. “There is always the concern that people would be chasing a lot of information good or bad, and when the Times or the Post splashes a headline about some sensational-sounding document that would seem to ‘prove’ that sanctions were working, or that Saddam was just a misunderstood patriot, or some other nonsense, we’d spend a lot of time chasing around after it.”

This apprehension is, sadly, a justifiable one. Nevertheless, it seems as though the benefits of making the documents public outweigh the potential drawbacks. The administration should take the chance and release the documents. If the Times and Post start mischaracterizing the information therein, well, that’s what this blog is for.