Honestly, I couldn’t make this up. Rightwing bloggers rejoiced when Republicans provided a public web portal for captured Iraqi documents so that us brave citizen journalists could scan the raw data for evidence of the mythical WMD’s. What could possibly go wrong?
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.
[…] 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.
America rightly condemned Pakistani bombmaker AQ Khan when he provided exactly this sort of service to anybody willing to pay his fee. But at least Khan charged for it. Thanks to our leak-happy Republican government America gives atom bomb specs away for free.
Note that the government didn’t take down the information after numerous experts warned them not to have that kind of information in public view. They only took it down after the New York Times started calling around, illustrating nicely how our government works (and for all the good that will do). If the leak only damages national security then where’s the problem? Only when the leak threatens to become a political embarrassment does the hammer comes down. Sad but disturbingly typical.
manyoso
Queue Darrell the pie eating blowhard with his spin that this proves pre-war Iraq WMD claims even though these documents detail the 1991-era program.
And go…
ThymeZone
Again, one is rendered speechless by the fecklessness of these people.
I’ll try to recover my senses by … Tuesday.
neil
If President Bush doesn’t say it’s a national security issue then it ain’t. God Bless America!
Darrell's Darrell
The lib New York Times trying to make Republicans look foolish and caring more about politics than defense of the
Fatherland, er, Homeland. How very honest, libs.Tom
Hussein was at one point one year away from building a bomb?
How is that possible? For years the Left has assured us he was “contained” and only interested in blue skies and kites.
JDRhoades
Here’s the truly fucked up part:
“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.”
Translation: The intelligence agencies insist on telling us the pesky truth, so we want to throw some stuff out there for right wing bloggers to cherry pick some dodgy and out of context tidbit and blow it up into some justification for this huge mess we’re in.
Ned R.
The funny thing is how everyone overlooks the 1991 part over on the right so far. Ledeen, Morrissey, etc. Someone’s e-mailed ’em by now, I hope. Or perhaps Darrell can do so after he is done with his pie.
Proud Liberal
Had enough America?
Larry M
And how does this get played at Red State? I don’t recall the exact headline, and I’m not going to go back to that cesspool to double check, but it was along the lines of “documents confirm Iraqi nuke program.” Almost got to admire the sheer shamelessness of it. Almost.
Tim F.
This story works just like Mao’s Thousand Flowers gambit, except that it brings out the stupid people.
neil
Yes, Tom, Hussein was at one point one year away from building a bomb. Then we utterly destroyed that capability with a brief, inexpensive war, without an occupation, followed by a strict international inspection regime. By the time we reinvaded in 2003, Hussein was farther away from a bomb than the average American research university.
manyoso
Ahh, and there it is. One wonders if such people truly are too stupid to follow the dates OR if they are just so profoundly dishonest that they troll around spouting this stupidity to make them feel better.
Assuming, Ted, that you aren’t really this stupid… does it make you feel better? Can you truly make your eyes and brain refuse to recognize the dates printed in the article? Are they like little fnords that you just can not see?
Steve
It’s obvious Negroponte didn’t want to release these documents because, uh, it’s not the way you handle intelligence information. John Hinderaker from Powerline was so incensed that he called for Negroponte’s firing over it – wow!
On the other hand, this diary – by a retired intelligence officer who posts at Redstate – took the more reasonable position that there are a lot of good reasons not to release these documents. Among other things, we might piss off important allies by inadvertently releasing secret information about THEIR operations in Iraq, and we’d be setting up a situation where our intelligence community would be wasting its time hopping around in response to every stupid question raised about the documents by Iraqi experts like Michelle Malkin.
Some sensible people saw his point and agreed; others, like our old friend TallDave, took the view that nothing could possibly go wrong, some taking the popular right-wing line that “who cares if we alienate our allies in the GWOT (like Russia) – they suck anyway!”
Heck, just reading those comments should have warned anyone that it wasn’t a good idea to unlease the right-wing blogosphere on these documents. But there was just too much pressure from the crazies who felt certain these documents would justify every stupid thing that was ever claimed about Saddam and his regime.
Um, yeah. No one could have foreseen the release of the atomic bomb plans, etc., etc. Way to think this one through, guys.
David
Irony joins satire in the dustbin of history.
Andrew
I blame Clinton/Kerry/Michael J. Fox for this.
The Other Steve
I saw the documents. They are clearly fake. The kerning and font spacing is all wrong.
Darrell
Yes, “old friend” TallDave which leftists here jeered nonstop as “idiot” “Bush blower”, etc, etc. Not ‘one or two’ insults at him, but a mountain of nonstop invective. I love how Steve stands up for his fellow leftists as if they are not unhinged freaks.
neil
We can add sarcasm to the looong list of stuff Darrell Doesn’t Get.
Andrew
I demand that Dan Rather resign!
The Other Steve
Are you sure those insults weren’t directed at you?
The Other Steve
Kites weren’t allowed until after we liberated the country, you moonbat!
Bender
Wait…so the New York Times is alleging that someone else may have published secret information that damages national security? And they think it’s a bad thing now? My Irony Detector is going crazy!
Tim F.
What an original comment, Bender. I bet Michelle Malkin never thought of that.
Teak111
This is a bit off topic. Its amazing the crap this country has gone through to deal with Saddam/iraq. First, we propped him up and did deals with him, then gulf war I, twelves years of UN sanactions, then gulf war II and he’s finaly gone but Iraq is a total mess. As a war suporter, I’ve finally concluded that we would have been better off with Saddam still in power. Monitored closely, of course. But Saddam (a Sunni) hated Iran and now that he is gone, Iran’s power and influence are on the rise. If he had contained Saddam or even traded cash for cooperation like we do in mayn countries, what would the world be like today, even the US?
Bender
Geez, it’s kind of an obvious point to anyone with even the slightest grasp of recent history. I’m surpised you didn’t mention it…heh.
Now let’s hear the Standard Donkey Chorus of “Come on, it’s not like Iran’s nuclear team didn’t already know
we were tracking their moneyhow to trigger explosives. There were a million other ways for them to have found out aboutthe SWIFT programmaking nukes.”Tim F.
Actually, Bender, that idea would only occur to somebody who has a frankly un-American view of how the press should operate. You shouldn’t feel too bad about it though, that sentiment seems fairly broadly distributed on the right. Maybe you were born believing in repressive authoritarianism or maybe it came to you through the toxic political milieu that defines the right these days, who knows. Nature versus nurture. Either way it seems unfair to blame you for it.
Steve
Yes, and now I’ve cited another example in which he comes off as a total idiot, blowing off the serious concerns of a former intelligence officer to say:
Basically, if I was so eager to prove that the war was justified that I accidentally got nuclear bomb plans posted on the Internet, I’d be a little red-faced at this point. Is anyone in the righty blogosphere actually EMBARASSED this morning? Anyone?
Steve
What’s funny is that I remember defending the NYT’s articles on the basis that they didn’t reveal any operational details of the NSA program, the SWIFT program, etc. For example, if they had said “Every transaction over $10,000 is monitored by a computer program, which checks for the following red flags…” I would have thought that was outrageous. But of course, since the NYT isn’t actually a bunch of idiots or traitors to America, except in your head, they’d never print anything like that.
The problem with putting these atomic bomb plans online is, uh, the operational details. Explaining how to build actual bomb parts. I don’t think the NYT was planning to run a five-part series on that topic anytime soon.
manyoso
Simple answers to simple questions:
Uhm, no.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
Perry Como
Listen, moonbat. No one could have predicted that posting unfiltered and unredacted intelligence documents could be a bad thing. Only an unhinged leftist would suggest otherwise. Like the deeply unserious John Negroponte.
RSA
No Medal of Freedom for you! </soup nazi>
Ted
Why does Darrell keep telling us that he likes pie?
chopper
you see, there’s this concept in history called ‘time periods’ which you might want to look into.
Perry Como
Hussein also had a time machine. Powerline told me.
chopper
and a shrink ray. don’t forget the shrink ray.
TenguPhule
It’s almost enough to make me believe there is a God. Almost.
And boy does It have it in for America these days.
Bender
Baseless, unproved assertion? Check.
Question the patriotism of someone for disagreeing with you? Check.
Apparent ignorance of the fact that the Ombudsman of the NYT publicly said that they were wrong to out the SWIFT program? Check.
Nothing’s funnier than a clueless brownshirt!
RSA
“. . .that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
tBone
Oh, the irony . . .
manyoso
That wasn’t questioning your patriotism, Bender. Love of country has nothing to do with it. Tim F. wasn’t questioning your love for country… he was merely questioning your _knowledge_ of country.
For instance, did you know that America was never intended to be a totalitarian state? Yah, it’s true. Look it up. That’s why when you go around espousing that America _should_be_ a totalitarian state… that’s unAmerican. It’s all about definitions, you see.
Pooh
Or Poland.
John D.
Bender,
I don’t particularly care what the Ombudsman says, ever.
The SWIFT program details were available long before the NYT published their story. Do you consider it “outing” if I announce the sky is blue? That Dean Koontz is a bestseller? That Darrell likes pie?
The formation of the FTAT (Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking program) was announced by this Administration itself on 9/24/01. When you, with much fanfare, announce “The Financial Action Task Force — a 29-nation group promoting policies to combat money laundering — adopted strict new standards to deny terrorist access to the world financial system.”, you’re talking about SWIFT.
The UN “outed” SWIFT as well, in 2002.
I know that spinal, reflexive hatred of the NYT is as much a part of the far-right genome as Clinton bashing, but it is flatly ridiculous to claim that a report of something that is already known is an “outing”. Sorry.
Lee
We should make this into a form letter :)
Richard 23
Weren’t these documents in the original Arabic? That’s good for al Qaeda — they didn’t even have to hire translators for the job. I think they probably have the same problem with teh gay translators that we do.
You just know that these documents were downloaded and stored offline by thousands of people. I wonder if the gov’t is trying to go through the access records. But the cat is already out of the bag.
Good one, fellas.
Perry Como
They’d see Hindrocket’s name at the top of the list.
Jay C
Is there anyone in the reality-based universe who actually believes that the “righty blogosphere” is even capable of embarrassment anymore? Their gleeful joy-jumping over the “proof of Saddam’s nukes”” in the Iraqi Document Dump ought, in a sane world, even further discredit the likes of the RedState loonies (yes John, I know: they’re your pals – sorry) from any serious consideration of their warped viewpoints ever again. But then, the hardcore war-defenders in the blogosphere seem to have fled the “sane world” in ever-increasing numbers: a good thing Bizarro World has a liberal immigration policy!
raj
Darrell’s Darrell November 3rd, 2006 at 10:41 pm
The lib New York Times trying to make Republicans look foolish and caring more about politics than defense of the Fatherland, er, Homeland.
Aside from the fact that the Republicans are foolish and do care more about politics than the defense of the–whatever–Germans do have a very good term for “Homeland.” It’s “Heimat.” The first time I heard Shrub bleat “Homeland Security,” I immediately thought “Heimat Sicherheit.”