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 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, 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.
Maybe now the media will stop perpetuating the myth that only Republicans are the "grownups" and the only party to be trusted on national security.
Once again, the Bush Republican legacy: playing politics with people's lives.
Not content with the mere outing of a CIA NOC by her own government, and blowing a whole network of undercover operatives and assets working on WMD issues in the Middle East, including in Iraq and Iran, the Bush Administration took its idiocy a step further: they published documents seized from Iraq online in a big, fat docu-dump as some sort of massive CYA maneuver to shore up support with their right-wing blogger mouthpieces and crazies like Rep. Curt Weldon and Sen. Rick Santorum, who still swear that there are WMDs buried somewhere in the Iraqi sands.
Except no one in the Bush Administration bothered to contemplate the ramifications of publishing thousands of pages of documents containing research and information on weapons of mass destruction theories from chemical and biological agents through to nuclear materials that Saddam Hussein had his scientists studying and collecting from the 1970s/1980s (when he was a US ally, btw) on to 2003.
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