Keeping Us Safe
by digby
Well, this is awfully good news:
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 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.”
Does everyone remember Pete Hoekstra’s call to unleash the blogosphere last spring? It sent the wingnuts into a tizzy:
Three years after the war in Iraq began, there is so much information about prewar Iraq that people have yet to see. The Iraqi Survey Group provided some answers, but it left open as many questions.
Sitting deep within a warehouse in Qatar are millions of documents that may shed some light on the issue.
Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte recently delivered meaningful news when he agreed to initiate a process that would declassify the 48,000 boxes of documents and hundreds of hours of taped conversations with Saddam Hussein and his key advisers.
Documents that I have personally reviewed reveal notes about Kuwaiti prisoners of war used as human shields in 2003 and missiles and chemical and biological weapons buried 40 feet below ground. They are not definitive. However, they are enough to raise eyebrows.
I can only speculate on exactly what the rest of the nearly 2 million documents will contain — perhaps very little new information but potentially a very great amount. The American public should have access to it now.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has indicated that he will post the information on the Internet so the public, the press and academics can read, study and understand it.
The approach carries with it risks, but such risks are minimal. It will enable us to better understand information such as Saddam’s links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and violence against the Iraqi people.
[…]
Such material requires the entrepreneurial spirit of academia and others to help us to better understand it. It needs to be posted online so we can unleash the power of the World Wide Web and shine a spotlight on it.
The proposed approach will be a transparent process rather than one mired in secrecy. It will allow us to leverage the Internet to enable a mass examination as opposed to limiting it to a few exclusive elites. What would have once taken years and decades may now be done in real time.
We now only have a pixilated snapshot of Saddam Hussein’s regime prior to the war. As more of the information is posted online, we will begin to bring into focus the more complete picture of prewar Iraq that has thus far eluded us.
Yeah. That worked out well.
Hoekstra had actually been agitating for releasing the documents for quite some time. In February, Instapundit reported:
PAJAMAS MEDIA CORRESPONDENT Andrew Marcus interviews Rep. Peter Hoekstra about all those unread Iraqi WMD documents. Hoekstra suggests parceling them out to the blogosphere. Call in the Army of Davids!
It looks like the ole perfesser and his pals didn’t realize that the Army of Davids might include a few soldiers of jihad. Ooopsie!
It’s a good thing the government is launching an investigation to find the dastardly bastards who leaked that Pentagon chart that realistically assessed the conditions in Iraq the other day. That puts America at risk. “Shining a spotlight” on nuclear bombmaking plans (conveniently written in arabic)by putting them all over the internet, on the other hand, is a terrific idea. That’s what the Republicans are all about — “a transparent process rather than one mired in secrecy.”
You can sure see why these guys have such a reputation for being good on national security, can’t you?
Update: Sadly No! has much more from last spring on how the blogosphere was unleashed. Let’s just say Red State and Powerline play a large part. Feeling safer?
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