Just To Be Clear

There are some things we have known for a long time.

One of these things is that, once upon a time, before Iraq invaded Kuwait and Papa Bush gathered the forces of the world to clobber the Iraqis in the Gulf War, Saddam had some guys working on building a nuclear weapon. They had plans that seemed pretty good, which lead the responsible parties in the world to dismantle the program. To keep an eye on them, they parked International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in Iraq for years after, and instituted sanctions to keep Saddam from getting stuff he would need to try again.

We also know, from extensive searching of documents and from testimony of Iraqis after Bush the Younger invaded Iraq, that there had been no rebuilding of the nuclear development program after it was torn apart in 1991. The much-ballyhooed "mushroom cloud" that encouraged the invasion was a manipulative fiction, since Saddam had no nukes, no way of building nukes, and had, in fact, given up on nukes after the Gulf War. Just in case that hadn't been true, there were also international inspectors there, just to make sure.

Many months ago, when the many true-believing Republican hawks were bitterly unwilling to accept the truth, or were manipulatively trying to cloud the issue, some of them came up with a clever idea. Or at least it seemed clever to them, at the time. Perhaps, buried in some captured Iraqi documents would be a clue to finding the "missing" WMDs that they knew, because the President had told them, must be there.

Clumsily borrowing from the very-trendy ideas of open-source software and the thousands of blogger researchers, they engineered an idea to have these documents put up on the World Wide Web, so that their hordes of fellow obsessives could scour through them, and find the clue, and then they could be vindicated.

Or, maybe not.

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.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 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.”

Who met with Cheney to discuss energy policy is a closely guarded secret. Nuclear triggers, on the other hand, not so much. It's all a matter of priorities, you see, and the priorities of this administration and its supporters have been much more about propaganda and power than about actual responsible government.

Already there are spinmeisters claiming that this is proof that the invasion was justified, and that Saddam had plans to build a nuke. They blithely ignore the fact that the documents date back to before Papa Bush's war. These documents are the very reason there were IAEA inspectors on the ground in Iraq, and why, among other reasons, there were sanctions. That the plans existed is not the news.

The news is that the Republicans in charge of our government put them up on the Internet for the world to see.

Had enough?