New York Times Blows Nuclear Whistle

I don't know what The New York Times is trying to accomplish in its breathless expose, "U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer."

I guess it wants to paint Republicans and the Bush administration as incompetent and putting sensitive information, such as a recipe for an atomic bomb, on the Internet for anyone to read.

The source of the information: Iraqi documents captured during the war.

From The Times:

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 had 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 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.

“For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible,” said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear arms program. “There’s a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so.”

So, The Times is in a lather about these IRAQI documents that nuclear experts consider too sensitive to post for public consumption.

It's suggested that the information in the IRAQI documents could be of assistance to states like Iran already on the road to building a nuclear bomb.

What is The Times saying here?

It's reporting that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons. It's reporting that Iraq's nuclear program was advanced enough to be helpful to other wannabe nuclear powers. The claim is that the dissemination of Iraq's nuclear knowledge, via a U.S. government website, posed a threat to security.

Of course, the point of the article is to condemn the Bush administration and to charge that it can't be trusted with keeping the nation safe.

BUT, in The Times' rush to cast aspersions on Republicans, it calls in to question its "Bush lied" template.

I'm confused.

The article continues:

Some of the first posted documents dealt with Iraq’s program to make germ weapons, followed by a wave of papers on chemical arms.

At the United Nations in New York, the chemical papers raised alarms at the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which had been in charge of searching Iraq for all unconventional arms, save the nuclear ones.

In April, diplomats said, the commission’s acting chief weapons inspector, Demetrius Perricos, lodged an objection with the United States mission to the United Nations over the document that dealt with the nerve agents tabun and sarin.

Soon, the document vanished from the Web site. On June 8, diplomats said, Mr. Perricos told the Security Council of how risky arms information had shown up on a public Web site and how his agency appreciated the American cooperation in resolving the matter.

Am I misinterpreting this?

Is The Times making the case that Iraq did indeed possess the recipes for weapons of mass destruction?

If this information was so sensitive as to be useful to our enemies, it would appear that Iraq was in fact a serious threat to our security.

It's possible that if Saddam Hussein didn't use the information to build up a WMD arsenal of his own in Iraq, he certainly could pass his weapons-building knowledge on to other enemies of the United States.

In sum, for this story to be significant, The Times has to admit that Iraq possessed WMD information that could have been used to do tremendous damage to the U.S. homeland.

But, listening to the Dems and lib media outlets, one gets the impression that Iraq was harmless and not a threat to us.

So which is it?