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.Of course, now in hindsight, this wont be good enough. Unlike at the start of the war when some 80% supported invading Iraq this would have met the threshold of threat to America. Bush critics, who have watched too much 24 wouldn't be satisfied now unless we found some sort of WMD with a timer ticking close to zero.
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. . . .
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.
For those who cared only about WMD--some vindication. But as we said, for us, this was only a little vindication. Our rationale for going to war included more than just WMD.
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2 comments:
Do you even read the articles you post? Here is a section from the article you linked to:
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.
Nice try.
anon,
it's not so contradictory as you think. Check out the analysis on this blog which tells the story the nyt leaves out:
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/008423.php
saddam had contact with UBL as authenticated by documents from the same file AND supported terrorism.
.....and he was actively pursuing WMD... he may not have had a finished product in his possession... but he was after them. the other important point to come from this document is also mised by the nyt.... if these documents, which were in saddam's possession, were removed from the website because people were worried they might help Iran or some other country develop a nuke, is it possible that they might have helped saddam?
jake is right, since the invasion, people's threshold for what constituted a threat to america has gotten progressively higher. i don't think they'd be satisfied unless inspectors found they had an ICBM pointed at the US and A. even then they might say, "what? only one nuke? come on!"
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