The Grey Lady Discovers Saddam Had Nuclear Aspirations

UPDATE

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.

I just had to put the above sentence from Jim Geraghty up at the top of this post….read further to get the inside scoop:

END UPDATE

I find it funny the lengths the NYT’s will go to in trying to destroy the Bush Presidency, and then shooting themselves in the foot….I mean WHO are they to question the release of sensitive information?

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.

You see, the story isn’t that Saddam had documents that showed them how to build a nuclear bomb and also tells us how close they were to building that same bomb….no, the story in their minds is that the Bush government put them on the web.

Will they now complain about all those documents that showed us the ties Saddam has with Al-Qaeda? You can take a gander at a whole bunch of them here.

Even funnier is the fact that the Times believes that if these documents had not been put on the web then Iran would never be able to build a bomb…..it’s not like they are actively trying huh?

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic issues said the documents showed “where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures.” The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. He called the papers “a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if you already have a car.”

Yup, the whole reason Iran is building a bomb is because Bush was so dumb he put up Nuke bomb building documents.

Sigh…..

And finally check out this paragraph in which they try to dismiss all those documents that tie Saddam to Al-Qaeda:

Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents, translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to second-guess the intelligence agencies’ view that Mr. Hussein did not have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy intelligence analysts, they argued.

Guess it all comes down to their meaning of substantive huh? I guess meeting with OBL, and telling the group that they want to help them is not substantive? Setting up terrorist training camps isn’t substantive?

No bias here.

UPDATE

Allah at Hot Air made some excellent points:

On behalf of every conservative in the United States, let me ask one question:

Exactly how far along was Saddam’s nuclear research that Iran might possibly benefit from it?

Update: Okay, two questions:

Why is the IAEA worried about Iran using bombmaking information in their “peaceful nuclear energy program”?

Good questions.

Hey, what do you know…the article answers one of them:

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.

But there was absolutely no reason to go into Iraq dammit!

UPDATE

A beautiful post by Jim Geraghty at NRO:

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.

And they think Bush is stupid.

More:

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.

And the kicker, as I and many have noticed:

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.

Indeed.

UPDATE II 2125hrs PST

Polipundit reminds us what Sen. Feinstein said in 2003:

“The bottom line is that Iraq did not possess, or have concrete plans to develop, nuclear, chemical or biological weapons in 2003 when the war began. There simply is no there, there. Saddam Hussein did not have an active nuclear, chemical or biological weapons program. Considering the statements that were being made by the Administration and the intelligence that was presented to Congress which said otherwise, this is quite disturbing and points once again to failures in the analysis, collection and use of intelligence.”

And also remember the recent Plame debacle. Wilson said Iraq never tried to get that Uranium, I mean what would they need with Uranium and the plans to build a bomb? Maybe they were just going to bake a cake…

UPDATE III 11/03/06 0845hrs PST

Wretchard from The Belmont Club posts his usual good stuff:

Posting very sensitive, undoubtedly secret restricted data is treason, isn’t it? And very irresponsible. The NYT should know. I’m rather disappointed in the Times for warning me, this late in the game, of the terrible dangers that lurked in Saddam’s archives. Recipes for unthinkable weapons that could have been given to just anyone, something Saddam surely wouldn’t do unlike the Bush administration which evidently would. They should have warned us sooner, such as during the days when Abu Nidal was in residence in Baghdad, and all those men of good will who are now cutting off the heads of Iraqis by the gross were in charge of those very documents whose shadow menaces the world. But they really didn’t exist then, did they? And even if they did they were in safe hands. Because if they did, then taking down Saddam was a responsible thing to do. But they exist now and releasing those newly existing secrets is a terribly irresponsible thing to do. It was the dream of alchemists to turn lead into gold and they failed. The NYT has succeeded.

I just cannot get my head around the fact that the Times was that blind. Blind enough to not see that what they were printing actually vindicated the US and Bush for going into Iraq. There is no other way to view this. If these documents were SO sensitive then this means Saddam was well on his way to getting that bomb, especially if he acquired that yellowcake.

But the left will deny reality, as they usually do, but continue to shoot themselves in the foot as they shrilly cry “it’s all your fault!”. Rick Moran:

For true irony (rather than blatant stupidity) Booman fills the bill nicely:

[T]he Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has completely f*cked up. You see, Peter Hoekstra just couldn’t believe Saddam Hussein has no WMD and thus posed no threat to the U.S. or his neighbors. So he threw a tantrum and insisted that our intelligence agencies put all the documents we seized in Iraq on the Internet where citizen wingnuts, fluent in Arabic, could discover evidence that our trained professional had missed. How did that work out?

[…]Hoekstra is supposed to be safe, but he is a total idiot that has endangered the safety of all 300 million Americans. There is no way he should be able to survive this, but Kotos doesn’t have much time to get the message out. Give him ten bucks so he can run some quick radio ads and maybe we’ll get a real progressive in a comservative (sic) western Michigan seat.

Leaving aside the laughably amateurish notion that a Dennis Kucinich liberal would have a ghost of a chance to win even if Hoekstra were to keel over and die, note first the title of Mr. Booman’s piece; “Peter Hoekstra Handed Our Enemies the Bomb.”

When has anyone on the left referred to any nation in the world as “our enemy” recently? Certainly not the Yankee Doodle minutemen killing our soldiers in Iraq. Those cuddly mullahs in Iran? The Laughing Goat in Venezuela? The inscrutable Mr. Kim in North Korea?

For the life of me, I can’t recall “enemy” being used by the left in any other context except when referring to the President of the United States. It would be delicious irony indeed if, in their haste to skewer Republicans over this story that the left discovered there are, in fact, nations who wish us ill and would destroy us if they could.

No way! There are no evil men, there are no evil countries, other then Bush. None of them would actually wish us harm, but you know if they did then it’s all our fault anyways because we’re so evil so we deserve it.

Sound’s like the leftist mode of thinking huh?

But the thing they will not be able to deny is the fact that this liberal crappy newspaper printed the following words:

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.

That, my friends, is a smoking gun.

In The Bullpen:

From the Duelfer Report, we already know one of the key findings with respect to a nuclear program was that Saddam Hussein was ready to reconvene a nuclear program once UN sanctions were released. In the period before the war, Iraq was attempting to bribe UNSC nations to remove those exact sanctions and bans.

UPDATE IV 1135hrs PST

Ray Robison has found something that pretty much kills the lefties attempts to disregard the 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.

That something turns out to be the Senate Prewar Intelligence Review:

The Senate Prewar Intelligence Review Phase II report reveals that Saddam’s Foreign Minster told the US government that Saddam was trying to build a bomb. He said Saddam was trying to get uranium and was irate that his nuclear team was taking too long.

In September 2002, the CIA obtained, from a source, information that allegedly came from a high-level Iraqi official with direct access to Saddam Hussein and his inner circle. The information this source provided was considered so important and so sensitive that the CIA’s Directorate of Operations prepared a highly restricted intelligence report to alert senior policymakers about the reporting. Because of the sensitivity, however, that it was not disseminated to Intelligence Community analysts.

Concerned that something may have been missed in our first Iraq review, the Committee began to request additional information from the Intelligence Community and to question current and former CIA officers who were involved in this issue. As noted above, the Committee has not completed this inquiry, but we have seen the operational documentation pertaining to this case.

We can say that there is not a single document related to this case which indicates that the source said Iraq had no WMD programs. On the contrary, all of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs.

So what did Saddam’s foreign minister tell the US government? From the report: [emphasis mine]

The intelligence report conveyed information from the source attributed to the Iraqi official which said:

• Iraq was not in possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon. Saddam, irate that Iraq did not yet have a nuclear weapon because money was no object and because Iraq possessed the scientific know how, had recently called meeting his Nuclear Weapons Committee.

• The Committee told Saddam that a nuclear weapon would be ready within 18-24 months of acquiring the fissile material.

Material like say….yellowcake?

What the Times has done is shown us that indeed Saddam was a HUGE threat. Imagine this man with the bomb.

Michelle Malkin links to Rep. Hoeksra’s statement which is a doozy:

In fact, as of today the DNI had withheld 59 percent of the documents that it had reviewed, and has become more risk-averse over time. If the DNI believes that the documents that were released were in the safe 40 percent, imagine what the 60 percent being withheld must contain.

[…]”These documents also raise several additional issues of interest. First, it is extraordinary that the New York Times now acknowledges that the captured documents demonstrate that ‘[Saddam] Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.’ This only reinforces the value of these documents in understanding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Only 1 percent of the estimated 120 million pages of captured documents have been reviewed, and we must continue working to promptly understand these materials. If there is concern about Saddam’s nuclear program, there should be similar concern about potential connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda suggested in the documents.

“Second, my staff’s preliminary review of the documents in question suggests that at least some of them may be internal IAEA documents. There is a serious question of why and how the Iraqi these documents in the first place. We need to explore that carefully – I certainly hope there will be no evidence that the IAEA had been penetrated by Saddam’s regime.

No way Saddam had penetrated the IAEA right?

Sigh….

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