What every Freeper should know about the GOP Nuke Secrets Scandal

[BurtWorm]

(Borrowed from another thread)

If you want this story to prove Bush was right, you really want it to show that the documents in question came into US hands AFTER March 20, 2003 AND show that the program was alive and well after the Gulf War. Those are the ONLY conditions (braindead Freepers, I'm shouting at YOU!) that would satisfy your craving for a document that damns Clinton and the anti-war left and exonerates Bush AND justifies letting slip precious nuclear secrets for anyone in the world--including Iran and North Korea--to see.

These documents meet absolutely ZERO of those criteria:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/world/middleeast/03cn...

<<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.

<<European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms. >>

...

<<In September, the Web site began posting the nuclear documents, and some soon raised concerns. On Sept. 12, it posted a document it called “Progress of Iraqi nuclear program circa 1995.” That description is potentially misleading since the research occurred years earlier.>>

[ClintonTyree]

1. That's the way the GOP talking heads are spinning it though......

I just saw some woman GOP talking head on MSRNC. She was trying to convince the moderator that, "if anything, this gives the Bush administration more reason to feel vindicated". I wanted to :puke: Apparently she's too stupid to realize that all of this "current information" was from BEFORE the first Gulf War. :eyes: Stupid is as stupid does and all of their stupid mistakes are coming back to bite them in the ass. You can't hide stupid very long. You can disguise it, paint it up, make it look nice, but stupid will ALWAYS bleed through. Just as it's doing now. :rofl:

[BurtWorm]

2. How stupid are the media being?

I mean, look at how stupid they were over the Kerry thing. Is it wise to trust that they won't be stupid over this, too?

By the way, the Washington Post is still silent on this story. But it's top story on the BBC right now.

[TahitiNut]

9. WaPo is "silent" on what story? They're all over the "nuke cookbook" story.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/03/AR2006110300490.html

[BurtWorm]

11. "All over it" is a bit of an exaggeration.

That's a Reuters story, for one thing. And for another, try finding it by visiting the Front Page, National News or Politics pages.

[malaise]

3. No one is listening to their spin

Pastor Haggard has grabbed all the headlines.

[BurtWorm]

4. Even here at DU, apparently.

:eyes:

[malaise]

5. Well I too am guilty

Haggard is a crushing blow to the gullible.

[BurtWorm]

12. I think it's just an interesting story

because the media love sex, drugs and religious hypocrisy. In the long run, however, this boils down to just another personal scandal with few or no wider implications. Which makes it look an awful lot like a distraction, to me. (Not singling out you, by any means! :toast: )

[understandinglife]

6. Recommended.

Never Forget: George W. Bush willfully violated National Security to cover-up his willful launch of a war of aggression and illegal occupation of Iraq .... and, now he willfully provided nuke-making instructions to terrorists -- if you doubt it, just check 'the google' ...

[SammyWinstonJack]

7. And another!

[TahitiNut]

8. Wasn't it nice of them to provide them in Arabic?

I thought that was thoughtful. After all, over a billion people on the planet read Arabic at least well enough to read their Koran. So nice.

[LilyLibber]

10. K & R

The notion that this story in any way bolsters Bush's case for war is a LIE. The RW media is showing their desperation as they willfully ignore the relevant dates in the article.

[walldude]

13. Actually if those documents had been current and it did

prove that Saddam was a year away from getting a nuke, it would only mean that now whoever grabbed those docs is less than a year away from having one. Maybe Condi was tired of people playing the "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" clip too often. She wanted to create some more reality.

on edit: K&R! :toast:

[BurtWorm]

14. I was just reading on a right wing site about this story

(they're strangely quiet about it for some reason ;-) ) and I was reminded, while peering through the winger froth, of how incensed they all were by the revelations last year in the Times about the warrantless wiretapping and financial monitoring. How incensed they were that the Times would give away secrets of national security that were now no longer secret. ("liberal pieces of shit demand openess and now use it for their own agenda" was the phrase that tripped this thought.)

What do those right wing pieces of shit think now about the Times making everyone--not just terrorists and rogue state nuclear scientists--aware of the idiocy of the Bushists and their pet Reepers in Congress who would do something so TREASONOUS? I have no doubt that they loathe the Times, but do they realize it's only because it's shone a klieg light on their shame? Of course most of them don't have a clue. But do any of them? Is the deafening silence over in wingerville a sign that some of them actually ARE ashamed?

[BurtWorm]

15. Dkos's Hunter has one of the best analyses of this scandal I've read anywhere

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/11/3/16123/1422


How Republicans Gave Iran (And Other Countries) The Bomb
by Hunter
Fri Nov 03, 2006 at 01:12:02 PM PST

(News flash: it was through politicization of foreign policy, pressure to justify a failed war, and staggering incompetence.)

Earlier this year, the Bush administration started releasing untranslated documents captured from the Iraq regime online, on an internet site set up to, as the New York Times quoted, "leverage the Internet" to allow avid conservatives to pore through the documents looking for what U.N. inspectors, the C.I.A., a massive U.S. government military hunt and a hundred forty thousand troops were not able to do -- find some evidence, somewhere, anywhere, that Hussein's weapons programs were continuing forward after they were shut down in 1991 by the first Gulf War.

It was among the more moronic of efforts -- it made no sense from the beginning, except as desperate partisan hackery -- done after public pressure from the GOP in congress, which in turn was based on a groundswell of outrage from (sigh) conservative pundits, bloggers and other far-far-right Republican acolytes that these documents were not being translated speedily enough, and so they should be released to the public so that the public (meaning desperate GOP supporters with time to kill) could pore through them themselves, looking for any shreds of political advantage in the trove.

Now, nobody really expected that these documents contained anything terribly meaningful. The evidence on the ground has demonstrated, through actual fact, that the weapons programs had indeed been shut down. The whole point of the exercise was a political one. But as it turns out, mixed in with those documents have been documentation of Iraq's previous weapons programs, including instructions for how to make Sarin nerve gas and, now, detailed explorations of how to make a nuclear weapon.

Ask yourself this. Would the administration have actually released these, had they known or even suspected that such information was in them?

If the answer is no, that tends to demonstrate the salient point -- that the administration presumed there was nothing damning to find in these documents, but released them as political ploy to momentarily shut their critics up.

If the answer is yes -- that they thought there were important, sensitive documents buried here, documents that dealt with nerve gas and nuclear weapons -- then doesn't that say something worse, that they were willing to release all those documents to the public (and to other nations) without even a cursory vetting, after pressure from GOP groups?