Documents forming the basis of Paul O'Neill's headline-grabbing charges that the Bush administration planned as early as Jan. 2001 for the fall of Saddam Hussein will be posted on the Internet as an "experiment in transparency." Here's the story: Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill made news recently when he charged in the release of his book The Price of Loyalty that President George W. Bush planned to invade Iraq in the first few weeks of his administration. The Bush administration initially charged O'Neill's evidence should not have been publicly disclosed. Days ago, current Treasury Secretary John Snow noted that the Treasury Department should never have released at least some of the documents, and vowed to review the department's procedures to ensure that such releases never happen again. Last week, the author of O'Neill's book, Ron Suskind, began posting the 19,000 documents cited in the book on the Internet. But the real story is not whether O'Neill or the Treasury Department should have released the documents, it is the fact that these documents, once pored over, may yield interesting insights into policy decision-making, and these insights may pressure this administration -- and future administrations -- to reveal more information in a more timely manner about their policy deliberations. If nothing else, the posting of these documents on the Internet shows that government has the technical capability to make more documents available to the public than it does now. The Treasury Department electronically scanned every document that O'Neill saw into an image file and stored them. So duplicating these documents and posting them online is relatively easy. So why are background administration documents such as these hidden from public view? Those who use the federal open-records law, the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), often complain that "pre-decisional" agency records are exempt from disclosure under FOIA. In other words, agencies do not have to disclose memos and other documents that government employees write while working through policy alternatives. The logic is that government employees should be able to enjoy a free exchange of ideas while forming policies, and the threat of these early memos' disclosure to the public would constrain early policy deliberations. Proponents of this exemption argue the public interest in government creating good policy decisions after complete and candid deliberations outweigh the public interest in disclosure of these documents. But many who attempt to obtain information from government through FOIA charge the "deliberative process" exemption has been used excessively to withhold information unnecessarily. If these documents yield new insight into the policy decisions this President has made, more Americans may find new benefits to disclosure and embrace such disclosure as necessary to understand their president's actions and hold their elected leaders to account. Paul O'Neill's papers may be accessed online at http://thepriceofloyalty.ronsuskind.com/thebushfiles/