[Rhodes22-list] Politics - WMD

[Brad Haslett]

You gotta love the intelligentsia at the New York Times.  No doubt, this was
supposed to be a hit piece on the Bush Administration.  Perhaps they
outwitted themselves?  An analysis and the original article from today's
newspaper is attached.

Brad

---------------------

*Shocker: New York Times Confirms Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program
*11/02 10:39 PM<http://tks.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTJjYzYzYmMwNjY3N2YwNWE5NDQ3ZTQzZDczZWU5N2Y=>
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 <http://www.drudgereport.com/> 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*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Iraqi_Freedom_documents>
* — 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<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03documents.html?ei=5094&en=1511d6b3da302d4f&hp=&ex=1162530000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print>
.

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.

ONE LAST THOUGHT: So Iraq had all the know-how, all the plans, all the
designs, "charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb
building." Unless they were keeping these documents around as future
material for paper airplanes, all this stuff constituted a plan of action
for some point in the future; but to complete creating these weapons, they
would have needed stuff. I don't know an exact list of what they would have
needed, but articles like this
one<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/users/login.php?story_id=3597&URL=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3597>give
a good idea. Sounds like you need a firing mechanism (the right kind
of
firearm would suffice), some fairly common industrial equipment like a
lathe, material for the bomb casing, some fairly common conventional
explosives, all of which would have been easy to get in Iraq. Oh, and, of
course, the nuclear material itself.

They would have needed something like... um... you know... what's that stuff
called? Oh, that's right.

*Yellowcake.*

But we know Iraq would never make an effort to get yellowcake. Joe Wilson
had tea with officials in Niger who said so.

 ---------
November 3, 2006
 U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer

By WILLIAM J. BROAD<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/william_j_broad/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

 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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org>who
had said they hoped to "leverage the Internet" to find new evidence of
the prewar dangers posed by Saddam
Hussein<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hussein/index.html?inline=nyt-per>.


But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts
say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of
Iraq<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/iraq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo>'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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/i/international_atomic_energy_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
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.

Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American
ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr. Schulte
about the Web site.

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."

The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the Web
site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents about
chemical weapons, United
Nations<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org>arms-control
officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave
information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by
causing respiratory failure.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications
and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed
adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March
2003 invasion. 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. American search teams never found such evidence.

The director of national intelligence, John D.
Negroponte<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/john_d_negroponte/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt
implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government
analysts. But President Bush approved the site's creation after
Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents'
release.

In his statement last night, Mr. Negroponte's spokesman, Chad Kolton, said,
"While strict criteria had already been established to govern posted
documents, the material currently on the Web site, as well as the procedures
used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed before the site
becomes available again."

A spokesman for the National Security
Council<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_council/index.html?inline=nyt-org>,
Gordon D. Johndroe, said, "We're confident the D.N.I. is taking the
appropriate steps to maintain the balance between public information and
national security."

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.

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on
the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations
Security Council<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/security_council/index.html?inline=nyt-org>in
late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on
the
Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively
edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.

The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with the
United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed
ElBaradei<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/mohamed_elbaradei/index.html?inline=nyt-per>,
the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the
nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002 that
the deletions were "consistent with the principle that
proliferation-sensitive information should not be released."

In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the
nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as
potentially dangerous. "It's a cookbook," said the diplomat, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because of his agency's rules. "If you had this, it
would short-circuit a lot of things."

The New York Times had examined dozens of the documents and asked a half
dozen nuclear experts to evaluate some of them.

Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government arms
scientist now at the war studies department of King's College, London,
called the posted material "very sensitive, much of it undoubtedly secret
restricted data."

Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/l/lawrence_livermore_national_laboratory/index.html?inline=nyt-org>in
California, an arms design center, said "some things in these
documents
would be helpful" to nations aspiring to develop nuclear weapons and should
have remained secret.

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. The official, who requested
anonymity because of his agency's rules against public comment, called the
papers "a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if
you already have a car."

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private
group at George Washington
University<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/g/george_washington_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>that
tracks federal secrecy decisions, said the impetus for the Web site's
creation came from an array of sources — private conservative groups,
Congressional Republicans and some figures in the Bush administration — who
clung to the belief that close examination of the captured documents would
show that Mr. Hussein's government had clandestinely reconstituted an
unconventional arms programs.

"There were hundreds of people who said, 'There's got to be gold in them
thar hills,' " Mr. Blanton said.

The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last
November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote to Mr.
Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer volume of the
documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence community.

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<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/al_qaeda/index.html?inline=nyt-org>.
Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy
intelligence analysts, they argued.

On March 16, after the documents' release was approved, Mr. Negroponte's
office issued a terse public announcement including a disclaimer that
remained on the Web site: "The U.S. government has made no determination
regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of
the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when
available."

On April 18, about a month after the first documents were made public, Mr.
Hoekstra issued a news release acknowledging "minimal risks," but saying the
site "will enable us to better understand information such as Saddam's links
to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and violence against the Iraqi
people." He added: "It will allow us to leverage the Internet to enable a
mass examination as opposed to limiting it to a few exclusive elites."

Yesterday, before the site was shut down, Jamal Ware, a spokesman for Mr.
Hoekstra, said the government had "developed a sound process to review the
documents to ensure sensitive or dangerous information is not posted."
Later, he said the complaints about the site "didn't sound like a big deal,"
adding, "We were a little surprised when they pulled the plug."

The precise review process that led to the posting of the nuclear and
chemical-weapons documents is unclear. But in testimony before Congress last
spring, a senior official from Mr. Negroponte's office, Daniel Butler,
described a "triage" system used to sort out material that should remain
classified. Even so, he said, the policy was to "be biased towards release
if at all possible." Government officials say all the documents in Arabic
have received at least a quick review by Arabic linguists.

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.

In September, the Web site began posting the nuclear documents, and some
soon raised concerns. On Sept. 12, it posted a document it called "Progress
of Iraqi nuclear program circa 1995." That description is potentially
misleading since the research occurred years earlier.

The Iraqi document is marked "Draft FFCD Version 3 (20.12.95)," meaning it
was preparatory for the "Full, Final, Complete Disclosure" that Iraq made to
United Nations inspectors in March 1996. The document carries three diagrams
showing cross sections of bomb cores, and their diameters.

On Sept. 20, the site posted a much larger document, "Summary of technical
achievements of Iraq's former nuclear program." It runs to 51 pages, 18
focusing on the development of Iraq's bomb design. Topics included physical
theory, the atomic core and high-explosive experiments. By early October,
diplomats and officials said, United Nations arms inspectors in New York and
their counterparts in Vienna were alarmed and discussing what to do.

Last week in Vienna, Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the
international atomic agency, expressed concern about the documents to Mr.
Schulte, diplomats said.

Scott Shane contributed reporting.