If you've been a loyal reader to The Squiggler then you are not surprised at the New York Times so-called November Surprise. You have been following the releases of various translated Saddam documents since the first ones were released. And you certainly have read dozens of posts supporting the fact that Saddam definitely had WMD and was valiantly and illegally trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. And now, your favorite mouthpiece for the terrorists has finally admitted that BUSH DID NOT LIE about Saddam's WMD programs afterall.
Everyone is covering this story today, but I want to point out a couple of outstanding posts and then give you a link list to many more so that you can get the full flavor of the blogosphere.
First, is The Anchoress with an absolutely hilarious post which starts off:
NYTimes: Bush told truth! Saddam a true threat! Yellowcake!
“Earlier today, I ordered America’s armed forces to strike military and security targets in Iraq. They are joined by British forces. Their mission is to attack Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors”
- President William Jefferson Clinton 12/16/98The Bush Derangement Syndrome at the NY Times has reached such yelpingly mad levels that the Times its inevitable breakdown is nigh. The most telling symptom (besides yesterday’s outright lying) of an impending crash is now manifesting itself as the Times’ inability to reason or use simple logic.
In the paper’s insatiable hunger to destroy the Evil Enemy Bush and His Minions, they have frontpaged this story:
U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq 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.
Yeah! In the wee small hours of some morning, President Bush, the stupidest (and most evil!) man in the world personally uploaded into the web ALL OF IRAQ’S NUCLEAR PLANS, drawings, diagrams, equations. (Ummm…actually Congress put this stuff online, but never mind about that. It’s not like they gave tech information to China, or nuclear power to North Korea, but I digress).
So, the NY Times twirls its mustache and writes:
Stupid Evil Bush Reveals Saddam’s Nuke Plans, and He was Only a Year Away from Having Nukes and….and….
Times Peon #1: HOLY CRAP, Mr. Keller, did we just validate everything Dick Cheney and Colin Powell and stupid evil George Bush said to the UN? When we’re spilling secrets, we’re not supposed to do that!Keller: OMG, WE DID! We DID validate these scheming nazi theocon bastards!!!
Times Peon #2: And…and…and what about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame and those sixteen words Bush said…you know, the impeachable 16 words about the Brit intelligence and the Yellowcake! Jim Geraghty at TKS says we might have freaking validated that story, too!
Read it all. I guarantee you'll love it.
After you finish with that post, move on to Captain Ed, the guru of the Saddam documents, as far as I'm concerned.
So I Guess The FMSO Documents Are Legit
That appears to indicate that by invading in 2003, we followed the best intelligence of the UN inspectors to head off the development of an Iraqi nuke. This intelligence put Saddam far ahead of Iran in the nuclear pursuit, and made it much more urgent to take some definitive action against Saddam before he could build and deploy it. And bear in mind that this intelligence came from the UN, and not from the United States. The inspectors themselves developed it, and they meant to keep it secret. The FMSO site blew their cover, and they're very unhappy about it.
What other highlights has the Times now authenticated? We have plenty:
* 2001 IIS memo directing its agents to test mass grave sites in southern Iraq for radiation, and to use "trusted news agencies" to leak rumors about the lack of credibility of Coalition reporting on the subject. They specify CNN.
* The Blessed July operation, in which Saddam's sons planned a series of assassinations in London, Iran, and southern Iraq
* Saddam's early contacts with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda from 1994-7
* UNMOVIC knew of a renewed effort to make ricin from castor beans in 2002, but never reported it
* The continued development of delivery mechanisms for biological and chemical weapons by the notorious "Dr. Germ" in 2002
Actually, we have much, much more. All of these documents underscore the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and show that his regime continued their work on banned weapons programs. We have made this case over and over again, but some people refused to believe the documents were genuine. Now we have no less of an authority than the New York Times to verify that the IIS documentation is not only genuine, but presents a powerful argument for the military action to remove Saddam from power.
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.
UPDATE: The article is up here.
Having now read it, I can see that every stop has been pulled out to ensure that a reader will believe that posting these documents was a strategic blunder of the first order.
But the story retains its own inherent contradiction: The information in these documents is so dangerous, that every step must be taken to ensure it doesn't end up in the wrong hands... except for topping the regime that actually has the documents.
(By the way, is it just me, or is the article entirely devoid of any indication that Iran actually accessed the documents? This threat that, "You idiot! Iran could access all the documents!" is entirely speculative. If the government servers hosting the web site have signs that Iranian web browsers accessed those pages, it's a different story; my guess is somebody already knows the answer to that question.)
I'm still kinda blown away by this paragraph:
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq 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.
Is this sentence referring to 1990, before the Persian Gulf War? Or 2002, months before the invasion of Iraq? Because "Iraq is a year away from building a nuclear bomb" was supposed to be a myth, a lie that Bush used to trick us into war.
And yet here is the New York Times, saying that Iraq had a "how to manual" on how to build a nuclear bomb, and could have had a nuke in a year.
In other news, it's good to see that the New York Times is firmly against publicizing sensitive and classified information. Unless, of course, they're the ones doing it.
ONE LAST THOUGHT: So Iraq had all the know-how, all the plans, all the designs, "charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building." Unless they were keeping these documents around as future material for paper airplanes, all this stuff constituted a plan of action for some point in the future; but to complete creating these weapons, they would have needed stuff. I don't know an exact list of what they would have needed, but articles like this one give a good idea. Sounds like you need a firing mechanism (the right kind of firearm would suffice), some fairly common industrial equipment like a lathe, material for the bomb casing, some fairly common conventional explosives, all of which would have been easy to get in Iraq. Oh, and, of course, the nuclear material itself.
They would have needed something like... um... you know... what's that stuff called? Oh, that's right.
Yellowcake.
But we know Iraq would never make an effort to get yellowcake. Joe Wilson had tea with officials in Niger who said so.
UPDATE
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.
My biggest confusion is how anyone who calls themselves a Christian can support this war. An estimate 400,000-800,000 Iraqi's are now dead due to the instability we created. Our false belief that militarism is a good way to bring peace is the height of hypocracy and is everything that Jesus stood against.
Posted by: Tony Trupp | 03 November 2006 at 03:08 PM
Oh please, spare us this Jesus was a wimp crap. Jesus was tough, an outdoorsman, a confronter of evil, a leader of men, not a dhimmi woos. And you really should get your figures from reliable sources rather than left-wing sites. Saddam was killing his people at the rate of hundreds of thousands at a time. His sons were trolling the streets for their next rape victims. The people were starving while Saddam and his Baathist friends were living large in their palaces and fancy cars.
Iraqis in numbers 70-90% are happy we rescued and liberated them. They do not want to return to the days of Saddam and his torture chambers.
So save us all from the Jesus was a wimp crap.
Posted by: Sara (Squiggler) | 03 November 2006 at 03:19 PM
Agreed. Jesus would be waterboarding people-- easy to visualize...
Posted by: Pete | 03 November 2006 at 04:39 PM
Note-- an anti-PC comment. Mohammed would be fine with waterboarding-- he had his critics killed once he could. But if you call yourself a Christian, either abandon Bush or convert to Islam; you should have been born into if you are one of these "Bush is good" people... it would fit you better.
Posted by: Pete | 03 November 2006 at 05:25 PM