Brain Dead

From CNN: U.S. yanks Web site with reported nuclear secrets

In a statement Thursday night, a spokesman for National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said his office has suspended public access to the Web site “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

The action came after The New York Times raised questions about the contents of the government site, called the “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal.” The Times‘ Web site reported Thursday night that weapons experts say documents posted on the government site in recent weeks provide dangerous detail about Iraq’s covert nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

“While strict criteria had already been established to govern posted documents, the material currently on the Web site, as well as the procedures used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed before the site becomes available again,” said Negroponte’s spokesman, Chad Kolton.

Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card said Friday that top officials knew there were risks when they decided to post the documents.

“John Negroponte warned us that we don’t know what’s in these documents, so these are being put out at some risk, and that was a warning that he put out right when they first released the documents,” Card told NBC’s “Today” show.

Pressed by Republican members of Congress, Negroponte’s office in March ordered the unprecedented release of millions of pages of Iraqi documents, most of them in Arabic, collected by the U.S. government over more than a decade.

The last paragraph is wrong. Negroponte responded to a Presidential directive, not members of Congress. No one in the Executive branch responds to the wishes of Congress.

Steve Gilliard talks about the incredibly stupid concept involved in this program.

Susie has the video of Keith Olbermann’s story on the involvement of Sen. Pat Roberts [R-KS] and Rep. Peter Hoekstra [R-MI], the heads of the Senate and House Intelligence committees, and a conversation with non-proliferation expert, Joseph Cirincione, on the damage.

Billmon’s piece, Freedom of Information compares the efforts of the Shrubbery to protect nuclear secrets versus the effort to hide who visits Cheney.

All is not dark. Every cloud has a silver lining. Who benefits from this program?

Easy, VEVAK, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and National Security, had all of this information dumped in their laps. The Iraq section has to have been in heaven since the site went up. Sure it was a busy few days initially downloading everything on the site at multiple locations around the world. But after that, it was 24/7 coverage to download any changes, and then shipping them to the proper agencies for study.

No secret meetings or dark alleys, but lattes at Starbucks downloading the site updates. The guy who downloaded the Iraqi cookbook for a nuclear weapon probably received a medal and a promotion, because the VEVAK definitely downloaded the information if it appeared on the site. No intelligence organization in the world that had any interest in Iraq would have missed that one, and they have all been monitoring the site, I can guarantee that.

As Joe Cirincione notes, this information was not the theoretical discussion of nuclear devices that is found on the ‘Net, this was a set of instructions more detailed that those you received with your IKEA computer desk. The only things missing were the discount coupons from the Dr. AQ Kahn black market catalog for nuclear technology, and it was in Arabic.

The New York Times didn’t do this, this major victory of politics over national security belongs to the Blight and their Republican masters. Exactly how people who don’t speak Arabic, and have no known facility with weaponry, chemistry, or physics were suppose to locate anything in these documents is beyond me. I would assume if the documents were in Arabic, they would probably attract people who read Arabic. I think I heard somewhere that the US is having a bit of a problem currently with people who read Arabic, so I don’t understand why the US government would be posting documents in Arabic on the Internet telling them how to create WMDs.