The Daily Background

As rumored yesterday, The New York Times front-paged an article about an online program which was created at the urging of Congressional Republicans.

Specifically, Republican House Intelligence Committee Peter Hoekstra and Republican Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts are blamed for getting the ball rolling on the program, which many conservatives had been calling for. President Bush personally approved of the online-document dump.

The program, which made publicly available online thousands of pages of documents from the 1991-era Iraqi weapons program, was pulled offline abruptly yesterday due to security concerns after several experts complained that the website was a threat to not only security but also the very cause of non-proliferation (some of the documents described in detail nuclear weapon specifications).

One analyst even called the series of documents a virtual “cookbook” for nuclear weaponry. The Times notes that several experts believed that secret information was being publicly disseminated, and notes that “One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.” Another said that the documents contained material that was “very sensitive, much of it undoubtedly secret restricted data.”

The documents were posted online in spring of this year because due to urging of Republicans in the hopes that the public would somehow find smoking gun evidence of a previously-unknown illegal Iraqi weapons program that would have retroactively justified the case for war in Iraq- that the professional American intelligence community had somehow missed.

Right-wing bloggers, amateur nuclear enthusiasts and other miscellaneous conservatives jumped on the online document dumps, predicting that all sorts of things would be revealed that the American intelligence community had looked over. Of course, no smoking gun was ever found, and people quickly forgot about the website.

At least, the American public did. However, the Times suggests, other countries seeking information on nuclear technology (such as Iran), may have found the information posted online valuable in their quest to become a nuclear power.

You can read the NYT report, which editors found important enough to place on the front page, here.

Honestly, I’ve only summarized the article in understandable terms. I don’t even think any commentary is necessary at this point. Suppoesdly this is going to be big news today- I don’t know whether it will be or not, really. We’re heading into the weekend news cycle, which is usually very light so either people will take off and this won’t get much play, or there won’t be anything else to report so this will get signifigant play.

If it does, it obviously looks bad for Republicans. I don’t know how easy the story is to understand though, so we may not see much of a trickle-down effect from it. The Foley thing was something everybody could understand. This- not so much. We’ll see how much play it gets.

Filed under: Iran Related, Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog