MORE THAN TWO MONTHS AGO, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra requested 40 documents captured in postwar Iraq as he sought better understand the activities of the Iraqi regime in the months and years before the U.S. invasion in March 2003. On Friday afternoon, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence finally provided 39 of the 40 documents Hoekstra had requested.

I had been seeking the same documents. For more than five months I pestered Department of Defense public affairs staff to see them. I provided titles to the Pentagon staff and, eventually, filed a Freedom of Information Act request. I got nowhere, so in mid-November we published the 40 titles in THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Here is how I described them in that article:

Some of the document titles I requested are suggestive, others less so. It's possible that the "Document from Uday Hussein regarding Taliban activity" was critical of one or another Taliban policies. But it's equally possible, given Uday's known role as a go-between for the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, that something more nefarious was afoot.

What was discussed at the "Secret Meeting with Taliban Group Member and Iraqi Government" in November 2000? It could be something innocuous. Maybe not. But it would be nice to know more.

It appears that we will know more soon. Hoekstra has asked his staff to review the documents before releasing them to the public. It is important to remember that this set of documents is a tiny percentage of the Iraqi documents that have been translated (.078 percent of the 50,000) and a mere sliver of the overall document take of approximately 2 million. Whatever emerges from this group may not be a representative sample of the overall document takes.

Here is the list we published.