Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Jeepers! Has Everybody Forgotten This Story?






Everybody is talking about the recent Bush conference and his idea that although the intelligence report that has been repressed for a year indicates that Iran halted its nuclear arms program in 2003, Bush insists that this means that Iran is more of a threat than ever.

Yes, I know that he is practicing doublespeak, I know that this is further evidence that nothing that the president says can be believed, I know that his saber rattling is a frightening indication that he wants to start another war, blah blah blah.

I am dumbfounded that nobody is talking about this quote as compared to a story that was buried about a year ago. The quote:

"Iran was dangerous, Iran is dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Bush told a White House news conference. iht.com

Hello!?!? Has everybody forgotten that Bush has already given the secrets of building an atomic bomb not only to Iran, but to every evil empire in the world? I remember when this story first broke. It's lifespan in the news cycle lasted from Friday afternoon to a Saturday morning. Supposedly the story was dropped because it was "unfair" and "too partisan" to run it because of the upcoming election.

A little over a year ago Bush put up a website that contained information that was captured in Iraq. Amongst this treasure trove the administration accidently overlooked part of the information that contained all of the secrets needed to build an atomic bomb. The website was called "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal", which is of course no longer online. The damage is already done, however. Every intelligence agency in the world is constantly watching the White House website like a hawk. There can be no doubt that the nuclear secrets are now practically in the public domain.


The New York Times called the material a "nuclear primer' because it included about a dozen documents in Arabic that contained "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." The fear was that these documents would give Iraq's nuclear secrets to Iran and thus aid the Iranian WMD program. Wikipedia


Bush put this website up without properly having it vetted by the CIA. Right wing bloggers pawed through it for months, trying to prove that the U.S. really did find evidence of WMD in Iraq.

After the story broke, the White House said that the story being printed was further evidence that the New York Times hated America, and that Bush was right all along about WMD's in Iraq. This was not true, however:


Many of the documents seem to make clear that Saddam's regime had given up on seeking a WMD capability by the mid-1990s. As AP reported, "Repeatedly in the transcripts, Saddam and his lieutenants remind each other that Iraq destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s, and shut down those programs and the nuclear-bomb program, which had never produced a weapon." At one 1996 presidential meeting, top weapons program official Amer Mohammed Rashid, describes his conversation with UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus: "We don't have anything to hide, so we're giving you all the details." At another meeting Saddam told his deputies, "We cooperated with the resolutions 100 percent and you all know that, and the 5 percent they claim we have not executed could take them 10 years to (verify). Don't think for a minute that we still have WMD. We have nothing."Wikipedia


This exchange actually took place on the November 3 edition of MSNBC News Live. I could not believe I was watching this on TV. It was like a some strange surrealistic nightmare. The president of the United States had just given the plans on how to build an atomic bomb to the whole freakin' world. Now I feel like everybody has forgotten the story.

When the president says, "Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon," Shouldn't somebody bring up this story? Loudly?





New York Times: U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
Physics Forums: White House mistakenly publishes nuclear secrets
truthout.org: You're Kidding Me, Right?