Following up on my earlier post on the subject, I foolishly believed that the fact that the Bush administration, at the request of right-wing blogs, magazines, and lawmakers, accidentally published nuclear secrets on the Internet would have been humiliating to conservatives. They wanted classified materials online so they could prove non-existent WMD were in Iraq, and the whole idea became a dangerous fiasco. It’s an embarrassment under any circumstances, but just a few days before an election, this kind of revelation has the potential to be devastating.
Or so I thought. I’ll spare you the details of the far-right’s rants, but Memorandum can point you in the right direction. In summary, conservatives are thrilled by the NYT scoop because, as they see it, the administration published seized Iraqi intelligence documents. If there were detailed secrets about how to make a nuclear bomb, this means … wait for it … Saddam “had a nuclear weapons program and was plotting to build an atomic bomb.”
The right can hardly contain their glee. They were right all along! How foolish does the left feel now!
Uh, no. The NYT article said the documents offered “detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.” This little tidbit isn’t buried deep into the article; it’s right up in the second paragraph. It’s kind of hard to miss.
In other words, the right is taking a humiliating article and making matters considerably worse by misunderstanding what it actually says. The revelations aren’t proof that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program before we invaded in 2003; it’s proof that he sought nuclear weapons before we invaded in 1991. Of course, we already knew that.
Jonathan Schwarz offered a handy little summary.
After the Gulf War, however, the Iraqi nuclear program was destroyed by the IAEA and never reconstituted. During this time the IAEA required Iraq to explain in detail exactly what their pre-91 nuclear program achieved. Copies of these documents were given to the U.N. on repeated occasions, including in fall, 2002. Before any were publicly released, sensitive information about weapon design, etc. was excised.
After our newest war huge numbers of Iraqi government documents were captured. America’s right pushed for them to be publicly released online. (They believed the documents would hold overlooked clues to Saddam’s Chamber of Secrets hiding his WMD and valentines from Osama.)
Now the New York Times has reported that the uncensored versions of the nuclear documents were accidentally included in the online release.
For reasons that only make sense in the bizarro world of right-wing blogs, this revelation is good news. I have no idea what they’re talking about. Scratch that — they have no idea what they’re talking about.
The mind reels.