U.S. turns to Web for help translating Iraqi files

In an interesting twist on open source, a story today in The Boston Globe describes how the U.S. government has started publishing captured Iraqi government documents on the Internet, hoping that Arabic speakers will help speed up their translation into English.

The story features an engineer, Joseph Shahda, who quickly began translating the documents and publishing them on a conservative Web site out of "a sense of duty."

Almost all of the documents have been given at least a cursory read, so U.S. intelligence officials aren't expecting any major surprises. But the files might help those eager to bolster the case for going to war, the story says. For example, Shahda quickly translated an Iraqi intelligence report of an interview with an Afghan informant that "suggests--but does not prove--agents of al-Qaida and the Taliban were active in Iraq before the Sept. 11 attacks," the story says.