Don't Look Now but. . . .

From one height of stupidity to the next. Just wait for the talking heads to howl tomorrow.

Tomorrow morning's New York Times reports that since April the bumbling bumblers in the bumbling Bush administration have been posting on the internet highly detailed, sensitive, classified information on how to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. Here are a few exerpts:

In September, the Web site began posting documents about Iraq’s nuclear program. 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.

The Iraqi document is marked “Draft FFCD Version 3 (20.12.95),” meaning it was preparatory for the “Full, Final, Complete Disclosure” that Iraq made to United Nations inspectors in March 1996. The document carries three diagrams showing cross sections of bomb cores, and their diameters.

On Sept. 20, the site posted a much larger document, “Summary of technical achievements of Iraq’s former nuclear program.” It runs to 51 pages, 18 focusing on the development of Iraq’s bomb design. Topics include physical theory, the atomic core and high-explosive experiments.

* * * *

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 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.

* * * *

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.”

U.S. Web Archive is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Guide, NY Times (Nov. 3, 2006)

The basic concepts for triggering a nuclear explosion are really not that complex: (i) take a ball of plutonium about the size of a grape fruit, (ii) surround it with explosives, and (iii) set the explosives off as nearly simultaneously as possible to compress the ball in on itself. We've all seen enough ridiculous action movies to know that much. The trick is the engineering. That kind of information should not be publicly available.

“It’s a cookbook,” said one senior European diplomat. “If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.” European atomic experts who have studied these documents "judged their public release as potentially dangerous."

“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.”

* * * *

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.

* * * *

Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government arms scientist now at the war studies department of King’s College, London, called the posted material “very sensitive, much of it undoubtedly secret restricted data.”

Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, an arms design center, said “some things in these documents would be helpful” to nations aspiring to develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret.

This is not the only sensitive information that has been posted on the internet by the Bush administration.

Some of the first posted documents dealt with Iraq’s program to make germ weapons, followed by a wave of papers on chemical arms.

In April, Demetrius Perricos, acting chief weapons inspector of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission filed a formal objection with the United States mission to the UN asking that the administration remove from the web sensitive information on making the highly toxic nerve gasses tabun and sarin. The report was removed from the web site shortly after the objection was filed.

That's what the administration has been giving away free to al-Qaeda, Hamas and any other terrorist (or 12 year old kid) with an internet connection.

The web site, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” is supposedly an archive of captured Iraqi documents (more on that "supposedly" later). It was created in April at the urging of conservative publications and Republican leaders:

who argued that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees told the administration that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for evidence that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion.

In other words, they put all this stuff on-line, hoping that someone would find a smoking gun where they couldn't.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R.-Mich.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R.-Ks.), and "some figures in the Bush administration . . . clung to the belief that close examination of the captured documents would show that Mr. Hussein’s government had clandestinely reconstituted an unconventional arms programs."

Some figures in the Bush administration? Clung to the belief? That couldn't mean Dick Cheney could it?

Apparently, keeping this sensitive material from al-Qaeda, Hamas, North Korea, is not as important to them as finding evidence to support the lies they told before the war. (By the way, this material is not the smoking gun they were hoping for. This material is from Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It's evidence that Iraqi scientists knew how to build a bomb, not evidence that they were building one.)

Of course, not every member of the administration supported this proposal:

The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site’s creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents’ release.

In other words, DNI Negroponte opposed the proposal because he was insulted. He wasn't concerned that this might be a bad idea. He was worrying about turf. President Bush went along with the politicos who were convinced they could somehow still salvage the fraud that led us into Iraq.

Curiously, though the nuclear information posted may not even have been captured in Iraq after the war.

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.

This leads me to three conclusions (i) that this material was posted on the internet even though it is so sensitive, we refused to share it with the UN Security Counsel, (ii) we had obtained this material BEFORE the war (i.e. during the administration of Bush I or Clinton), and (iii) the administration may have been deliberately "salting" the archive to make it appear that there was new evidence to be found.

Don't bother looking for it now:

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials.

Yes, public safety be damned, who cares what arms-control officials have to say, never-mind the risk to the country or the danger of this act of complete idiocy - - at least not until the liberal media catches on.

Thank god for the liberal media.

The people who were demanding an apology yesterday, owe us a big one today.