Monday, Nov. 6, 2006 | 7:36 a.m.
Federal officials have shut down a U.S. government Web site that, under the guise of posting Iraqi documents to support justification for going to war, gave detailed instructions on how to construct a nuclear bomb.
According to a story by The New York Times on Friday, the site, which was launched in March, was taken down Thursday night after the Times exposed its existence and asked U.S. intelligence officials why such information had been posted. The site's contents included a trove of Iraqi documents dating back more than 15 years that have been seized during the war. Among them were details of Iraq's secret nuclear research that predates the 1991 Gulf War, the Times reports.
European diplomatic sources told the Times that officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency complained last week to the U.S. ambassador to the agency that the posted information could help such nations as Iran develop nuclear weapons. And U.S. Intelligence Director John Negroponte had previously warned the White House that it was uncertain as to what was in the documents and that posting them was risky, former White House chief of staff Andrew Card said Friday on NBC's "Today" show.
For months, the United States has joined other nations in trying to force Iran to halt its nuclear program out of fear that the unstable regime would develop nuclear weapons. Yet for all of that time, the United States posted right on the Internet the documents detailing complicated formulas for building every part of such weapons, including detonation triggers. And they're in Arabic.
Amazingly, such sensitive information was released at the direction of President Bush, caving to pressure from Republican conservatives who said that posting the documents would help find new evidence that justified the Iraq war. But it was an obviously desperate attempt to justify an increasingly unpopular war in the months leading up to an election.
That congressional Republicans and the Bush administration pushed for the posting of these documents against the wishes and repeated warnings of not only international nuclear experts but also of the United States' top intelligence agency official shows the kind of arrogance and ignorance that have peppered the entire approach to the war in Iraq. For Bush and some congressional Republicans, apparently, "intelligence" is a relative term.
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