The Bush administration has released pre-war 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 a US army Web site, are the first to be publicly released from a huge cache of materials confiscated by US forces in Iraq.
The collection is comprised of 48,000 boxes of papers and tape-recorded conversations, including many involving Saddam himself, officials said.
Also released 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.
Mr Negroponte's office, under pressure from conservatives including Republican lawmakers, decided in recent days to set up a process for the material's release, which is expected to take months.
The material, housed in Qatar, has already been examined by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group and continues to be scrutinized by the US military for intelligence that could be acted upon.
Republican lawmakers say the data could still address US claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and had ties with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, which carried out the September 11 attacks.
Both allegations helped justify a war that has become increasingly unpopular in a mid-term election year that has Republicans in Congress feeling vulnerable.
But no WMD have been located in Iraq and independent investigators have found no evidence that Saddam had a collaborative relationship with al-Qaeda.