Reading some conservative columnists piece in the paper yesterday, he made the claim that in the 11/03/06 New York Times there was an article on the captured Iraqi documents which had been published on the web that quoted experts as saying Saddie was roughly 1 year away from developing a nuke. He only quoted one sentence and given that context is everything and that I haven’t heard anyone else make this claim, I’m wondering what’s up with it? Did he fabricate it, or is there more detail to it which indicates that it’s not true, or, is it, in fact, accurate, and no one’s talking about it for some reason?
friedo
November 22, 2006, 10:28pm
2
This looks like the article in question. If you don’t have a NY Times account, here are some excerpts:
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 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.
‘‘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.’’
The Web site, ‘‘Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,’’ was a constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of documents included everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein’s intelligence service. It became a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur historians.
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. **
In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as potentially dangerous. ‘‘It’s a cookbook,’’ said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency’s rules. ‘‘If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.’’
It’s a little unclear what the Times means by “at the time,” does that refer to immediately after the Gulf War in 1991, or to 2002? I dunno.