House Organ For Dems Uncovers Evidence Of Nukes In Iraq

24th nuclear detonation of USSR. This was the first air delivered thermonuclear weapon test. The device codenamed RDS-37 was built upon Sakharov's Third idea, basically this is same as Teller-Ulam design. Image Credit: Nuclear Weapons Image Gallery - zvis.com

House Organ For Dems Uncovers Evidence Of Nukes In Iraq

After years of articles exclaiming "Bush Lied And People Died", a chant asserting that the president lied about the nuclear activity and ambitions of Saddam Hussein and the threat Iraq posed to the free world, The New York Times found evidence that the ability to make nukes did in fact exist in Iraq.

In a story designed to mock the federal government's effort to post information found in documents taken out of Iraq, The New York Times in its glee to show the Bush Administration in a poor light, proves that there was factual document evidence Iraq had the wherewithal to produce a nuclear weapon ... and that the posting of this information poses a threat to the United States.

Suddenly, The New York Times is worried about the security of the United States

Excerpts from The New York Times -

U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD - Published: November 3, 2006

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."
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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.
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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.
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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 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, 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."
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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."
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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.
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The New York Times, who had no problem in releasing current 2001-2006 information on our security efforts and interrogation efforts to protect the United States, now has a problem with the release of information on weapons programs out of Iraq - pre 1991 - stating that this poses a threat to the security of the United States.

Good work NY Times! Iraq had nukes. Thanks for the heads-up!

This editorial UPDATE from The New York Post -

ELECTIONEERING OF THE TIMES
Editorial From The New York Post

November 4, 2006 -- Yesterday's front-page story in The New York Times about the U.S. Web archive of captured documents detailing Saddam Hussein's quest for nuclear weapons raises a lot of serious questions - certainly more serious than the one the paper itself was trying to highlight.

The point of the Times story, coming just four days before the critical midterm congressional elections, was clear: The Bush administration messed up big-time by posting on the Web a collection of documents on Iraqi WMD programs that "could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms."

Just how helpful is open to debate; the paper's own experts don't seem to agree. And at least one of them seems to have a vested interest in embarrassing the White House: He's been a longtime repeat contributor to the Democratic National Committee and to John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.

But the story confirms something else again: Saddam had an active program to build nuclear weapons - and, at one point, was "as little as a year away" from actually building one.

Indeed, the plans he'd assembled were so advanced that they constituted, in the words of one unnamed diplomat consulted by the Times, "a cookbook" that would be helpful to regimes like Iran that are actively seeking WMDs - though not to terrorist groups, or even less-developed states.

Or, as Jim Geraghty writes on National Review Online, "the anti-war crowd is going to have to argue that the information wasn't dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous [when] posted on the Internet."

Indeed, some of the documents were said to be identical to ones submitted just months before the 2003 invasion to the U.N. Security Council by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency. This certainly suggests that, even then, the IAEA was seriously concerned by Saddam's quest for WMDs.

In other words, George W. Bush didn't lie the country into war.

Which is precisely the kind of information that congressional Republicans suspected was in those documents - 48,000 boxes of which were seized after Saddam's ouster - when they pressured the administration to make them public in the first place.

And which makes us wonder why the White House has been so reluctant to do that on its own.

In fact, the Times story essentially confirms the credibility of other - even more incriminating - captured documents from the same cache that have been translated and posted to various blogs and Web sites, like Captain's Quarters (captainsquartersblog.com).

Documents that, among other things, detail Saddam's relationship with al Qaeda and his coordination with the suicide bombers of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Or his post-9/11 efforts to make ricin, a poisonous gas.

All of which sounds pretty much like a genuine threat to global stability and security.

But that's not the message the Times is pressing in its conveniently timed November Surprise.

The Times would have us believe that the Bush administration, through its own carelessness, has helped spread nuclear proliferation.

The documents themselves tell a different story.

The real threat was posed by Saddam Hussein, whose longtime quest for nuclear weapons was ended, once and for all, by his removal from power.

The world is safer for it.
Reference Here>>