Posted on 11/02/2006 8:01:04 PM PST by RDTF
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”
Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.
The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Response the NYT Article Regarding Iraq Nuclear Program.
November 3rd 2006 | jveritas
Posted on 11/02/2006 11:48:45 PM EST by jveritas
I totally agree with your assessment.
But they are too blind to understand any of this any more.
The Republicans will win both houses of Congress and Bush will now have the proof from the NYT, itself.
From NRO link:
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
Is this sentence referring to 1990, before the Persian Gulf War? Or 2002, months before the invasion of Iraq? Because "Iraq is a year away from building a nuclear bomb" was supposed to be a myth, a lie that Bush used to trick us into war.
And yet here is the New York Times, saying that Iraq had a "how to manual" on how to build a nuclear bomb, and could have had a nuke in a year.
In other news, it's good to see that the New York Times is firmly against publicizing sensitive and classified information. Unless, of course, they're the ones doing it."
hmmmmmmmmmmm interesting.........veeeeeeeeeery interesting.
he is right. No one, at least no one I have heard of, has disputed that Iraq had a major nuclear weapons program until after the 1st Gulf War
what people disputed is if Hussein had an ongoing WMD program in 2002-2003
the fact that they retained technical knowledge is no surprise. this isn't a smoking gun
Do you know anything of the work of Freeper jveritas?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1731259/posts
Amen. Another that occurs to me is that David Kaye, and that other guy who headed the Iraq (WMD) Survey group claimed that they had turned over every rock in Iraq, and hadn't found anything incriminating. Yet somehow they missed these documents. So did they really overlook these documents (which would speak to the "thoroughness" of the job they did), or did they see these documents, and were untroubled by them? For that mattter, what about Blix, El Baradei, et al; when did they first see these documents, and at what point did they decide that they were too dangerous for the internet?
I don't think that arguing Clinton had it under control and Bush screwed it up will work. If NYT had an angle like that to use, they would have referenced it in their article. They specifically referenced 2002 docs to the United Nations. By including such a precarious date, they were somehow indicating the currentness of the step by step becauase if only the 90's were posted, then everyone can say that those docs were outdated. Who would care about some outdated instructions that Saddam had years to share with his Mideast friends.
I think the diagrams they are referring to came from the 2002 report otherwise they would have left it out. This is their way of trying to say that "at the time" could mean the 90's but had to include 2002.
Yes it is.
Sounds to me like their was a lot of oversight - if you read from that viewpoint.
With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion
Sounds to me like it was the dems fault that Bush had to put such docs on the internet
LOL, so the NYT thinks no other nation on earth can build a nuke without Bush giving away Saddam's plans?
So how have they been built for the last 50 years?
Good grief, these people are just plain silly.
I hope the Sunday news programs mention this.
Yes, very ambiguous.
My guess is that it refers to the 1990's or before the first Gulf War. After invading in 1991 our intel people were shocked when they saw how far along Saddam's nuclear weapons program was. It's no secret that Iraq was close to having nukes around that time. As far as that goes, the NYT piece just seems to be restating a fairly well known fact.
The posting of these documents on the net seems fairly trivial to me too. Well, not trivial, but still nothing to get too worked up about.
I think the earlier poster had it right -- YAWN.
Excellent point and LOL ridiculous, isn't it?!
I am lovin' this!
Seems to me that the NYT wanted the site shut down because translation of documents would make Bush right.
Christian news and commentary at: sacredscoop.com ...
See my previous post. Odd how the press keeps missing these things right before election time.
Thank you for the ping to this thread and your post, Proud Yank.
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