The Stout Republican

I called the friends when I saw the Drudge teaser about a NY Times article on WMDs. I thought “By Golly They Found Them”…and the New York Times is reporting it.

I was 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 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.

What’s that you say? The US gave Nuclear information to Iran unwittingly through their website? Face value, bad bad…but wait…dig deeper. Does this in fact mean Iraq had accurate, usable nuclear information:

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic issues said the documents showed “where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures.” The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official, who requested anonymity because of his agency’s rules against public comment, called the papers “a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if you already have a car.”

This means that Iraq documents showed not only how to build nuclear arms, but where they had failed in their own attempts? I thought Iraq had an antiquated program that was useless…right?

The irony lies in the fact that the press is relying on the accuracy of these documents (which prove Saddam was actively pursuing a Nuclear program) from the same web site that they claimed documents purporting a Saddam – al Qaeda link…were false. This should all be good for the Republicans, but it won’t be…there’s going to be the glossing over of the eyes as soon as you start ot discuss or analyze more in depth. What is it that Going There always says? That’s right “Mooers’ Law“:

An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it.

Where an information retrieval system tends not to be used, a more capable information retrieval system may tend to be used even less.

Just like the NIE Document, the picking and choosing will begin, and what was originally a movement in open government and sunshine policy by sharing what we found, is going to be changed into negligence on the part of this government (read Republican) and Mr. Bush (waiting for the special Olbermann comment). The irony is thick indeed. It’s not like if this was found internally, that it wouldn’t have been leaked by someone in the department anyways (can you say epidemic?).

We’ll see where this goes. Click through to Hot Air as they’ll have far more updates than I will be able to (damn this white collar and it’s chains of…wait…I get paid tomorrow…w00t).

Iraq, WMD, msm