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November 03, 2006

Times bombshell story

The New York Times carries as their front page article today "U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer".

Which by and large, and quite rightly attacks the Bush administration for publishing these particular Iraqi documents on the internet.

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 elsewhere 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.

Emphasis added

Well, you know, anywhere else except the UK's Ministry of Defence, which released a step by step guide in 2002 and helpfully added in how to smuggle it into the country.

Regardless, definitely something you don't want on the internet and a fair criticism. Heads should roll for it. No argument there.

However, the closing paragraphs didn't fit so well.

The Web site, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” was a constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of documents included everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein’s intelligence service. It became a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur historians.

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had 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.

Emphasis added

Whether they were a year away in the 1990s and the shell games with the UN inspectors slowed them up, or they were a year away in 2002 is not made clear, nor is it of particular relevance.

I think I can reconcile all of this:

There were no weapons of mass destruction being developed in Iraq. There was no reason to go to war. If we hadn't, Iraq now would have been a counterbalance to Iran, but without the nuclear deterrent they weren't not developing. But there was a war, Saddam was deposed and the Bush administration subsequently published all the papers it found there that hadn't been torched.

Some of these papers contain information that should never have been released.

Someone might do something bad like build a nuclear bomb with them.

Obviously not Iraq, because they weren't developing any WMD, just like they kept telling the UN instpectors. But someone, someone we wouldn't trust in the same way we would Saddam, just might.

The world was a far safer place when Iraq (and not the inept US government) had these documents securely contained in its research facilities.

Why is the room spinning?

Scrawled illegibly by Meathe at November 3, 2006 10:47 AM

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