JVERITAS Responds to the 11/3 NYT Article Regarding Iraq Nuclear Program.

The New York Times article to be published on November 3rd 2006 is about the US putting some captured Iraqi documents on the Foreign Military Intelligence Office (FMSO) website that talks about what the NYT and the IAEA call sensitive information from Iraq 1996 "Full, Final, and Complete Declaration FFCD presented to the UN and IAEA in 1996 and that talks about Iraq nuclear clandestine program. The IAEA and the New York Times claim that Iran may be using some of the technology in this FFCD which is a laughable idea as shown below.

That is from the IAEA website regardinf their report on Iraq FFCD presented to them by the Iraqis in 1996: “ 3. On 7 September 1996 in Baghdad Iraq delivered what it considered to be the definitive version of the "Full, Final, and Complete Declaration" (FFCD-F) of the Iraqi clandestine nuclear programme. The IAEA with the assistance of technical experts from Member States undertook a comprehensive review of the document.” Link: http://www.iaea.org/About/Policy/GC/GC41/Documents/gc41-20.html

So the FFCD was discussed with member states experts of the IAEA. There are 142 members in the IAEA including Iran. I am not saying that the IAEA discussed the Iraqi FFCD with Iranians but the FFCD was not such a secret document and the Iranians would have been able to access it in one way or another if it really provide them with any useful information.

What is important in this whole issue is that the New York Times has ridiculed these documents all along and never payed attention to them including the very important documents that show Saddam regime never stopped its programs related to WMD including nuclear programs. These documents were translated and posted here on FR.

On the subject of nuclear program, I translated and posted a document last month dated January 2001 that shows with a shadow of doubt that Saddam was personally involved with his nuclear scientist to re-build the nuclear program. In this document it states that Saddam personally approved his Iraqi Atomic Energy Agency to re-use nuclear equipments that include something called “Degussa Furnaces” that were used in the previous and prohibited Iraq nuclear program. These furnaces can be used to melt uranium and other nuclear related activities. The Degussa Vacuum furnaces were supplied to Iraq in the 1980’s by a German firm (Degussa AG based in Frankfurt Germany) and these furnaces later on became the subject of investigations of the German firm in the early 1990’s where the company claimed that they did not know that Iraq would have used them in its nuclear program.

The New York Times had an article in 1998 titled “An Iraqi Defector Warns of Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Research” where the Degussa furnaces were mentioned as part of “previous” Iraq nuclear program and the controversy surrounding the sale of these furnaces and the investigations later on(link: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sanders/214/other/news/iraqi_defector.html ). The irony is that this is not only a New York Times article but also it was written by JUDITH MILLER and JAMES RISEN once of the worst accusers (liars) that the Bush administration lied about Iraq WMD. Where are you Scott Shane????

Moreover, there are documents dated 1999-2001 that talk about Saddam regime projects to re-build some of the nuclear program facilities like RWTS (Radioactive Waste Treatment Station) and Radio-Chemistry laboratories which were part of Iraq previous clandestine nuclear program. Link to the translated document on FR: Iraqi Documents: Projects to Rebuild Saddam Nuclear Facilities http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1718125/posts .

Shocker: New York Times Confirms Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program

When I saw the headline on Drudge earlier tonight, that the New York Times had a big story coming out tomorrow that had something to do with Iraq and WMDs, I was ready for an October November Surprise.

Well, Drudge is giving us the scoop. And if it's meant to be a slam-Bush story, I think the Times team may have overthunk this:

U.S. POSTING OF IRAQ NUKE DOCS ON WEB COULD HAVE HELPED IRAN...

NYT REPORTING FRIDAY, SOURCES SAY: Federal government set up Web site — Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal — to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war; detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research; a 'basic guide to building an atom bomb'... Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency fear the information could help Iran develop nuclear arms... contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that the nuclear experts say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums...

Website now shut... Developing...

I'm sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?

What? Wait a minute. The entire mantra of the war critics has been "no WMDs, no WMDs, no threat, no threat", for the past three years solid. Now we're being told that the Bush administration erred by making public information that could help any nation build an atomic bomb.

Let's go back and clarify: IRAQ HAD NUCLEAR WEAPONS PLANS SO ADVANCED AND DETAILED THAT ANY COUNTRY COULD HAVE USED THEM.

I think the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a "Boy, did Bush screw up" meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down the "there was no threat in Iraq" meme, once and for all. Because obviously, Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh... al-Qaeda.

The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivous to it.

The antiwar crowd is going to have to argue that the information somehow wasn't dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous posted on the Internet. It doesn't work. It can't be both no threat to America and yet also somehow a threat to America once it's in the hands of Iran. Game, set, and match.

UPDATE: The article is up here.

Having now read it, I can see that every stop has been pulled out to ensure that a reader will believe that posting these documents was a strategic blunder of the first order.

But the story retains its own inherent contradiction: The information in these documents is so dangerous, that every step must be taken to ensure it doesn't end up in the wrong hands... except for topping the regime that actually has the documents.

(By the way, is it just me, or is the article entirely devoid of any indication that Iran actually accessed the documents? This threat that, "You idiot! Iran could access all the documents!" is entirely speculative. If the government servers hosting the web site have signs that Iranian web browsers accessed those pages, it's a different story; my guess is somebody already knows the answer to that question.)

I'm still kinda blown away by this paragraph:

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.

http://tks.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTJjYzYzYmMwNjY3N2YwNWE5NDQ3ZTQzZDczZWU5N2Y=

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