So it appears.  H/T Stop the ACLU

Tomorrows paper will include this story:

U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Guide

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Well we knew that but…

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.

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.

The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002 that the deletions were “consistent with the principle that proliferation-sensitive information should not be released.”

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.”

Well it may not be the smoking gun but it does again raise the questions about Saddam and just how abandoned his WMD programs were.

This is not unusual.  The crosstalk about this is insane sometimes.  The whole Joe Wilson flap for example.  Joe swore that Saddam was not trying to buy Yellow Cake Uranium, even though it was later proven he was, and his own report said he was, but more importantly no one mentions very  often that Saddam had 500 tons of the stuff already, which if you couple that with this report, makes me very concerned about his nuclear ambitions.

So why is this an own goal?  Because the liberal mantra that has been willingly carried by the Times has always been that Bush Lied about Saddam and WMD’s.

At National Review it was noted:

I think the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a “Boy, did Bush screw up” meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down the “there was no threat in Iraq” meme, once and for all. Because obviously, Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh… al-Qaeda.

The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivous to it.

The antiwar crowd is going to have to argue that the information somehow wasn’t dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous posted on the Internet. It doesn’t work. It can’t be both no threat to America and yet also somehow a threat to America once it’s in the hands of Iran. Game, set, and match

That pretty much covers it.  I can’t wait to see the spin from all sides.

Some question (rightly) the timing, but I am unsure what they hoped to accomplish.  More later as the atory developes.

Flopping Aces points out an interesting bit of hypocrisy:

I find it funny the lengths the NYT’s will go to in trying to destroy the Bush Presidency, and then shooting themselves in the foot….I mean WHO are they to question the release of sensitive information?

Heh!

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