New York Times Confirms Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program

[mvpel]

NRO: Jim Geraghty

When I saw the headline on Drudge earlier tonight, that the New York Times had a big story coming out tomorrow that had something to do with Iraq and WMDs, I was ready for an October November Surprise.

Well, Drudge is giving us the scoop. And if it's meant to be a slam-Bush story, I think the Times team may have overthunk this:

U.S. POSTING OF IRAQ NUKE DOCS ON WEB COULD HAVE HELPED IRAN...

    NYT REPORTING FRIDAY, SOURCES SAY: Federal government set up Web site ? Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal ? to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war; detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research; a 'basic guide to building an atom bomb'... Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency fear the information could help Iran develop nuclear arms... contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that the nuclear experts say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums...

I'm sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?

What? Wait a minute. The entire mantra of the war critics has been  "no WMDs, no WMDs, no threat, no threat", for the past three years solid. Now we're being told that the Bush administration erred by making public information that could help any nation build an atomic bomb.

Let's go back and clarify: IRAQ HAD NUCLEAR WEAPONS PLANS SO ADVANCED AND DETAILED THAT ANY COUNTRY COULD HAVE USED THEM.

... continued at link ...

The New York Times story in question.

[Russell Kanning]

Bad people should also not be allowed to own guns.

[Kat Kanning]

It's hard to believe your hypocricy.  Is it right for people to be able to arm themsevles or not?  Why is it right for Americans to arm themselves and not Iraqis?  Because their government may or may not have had weapons, you think it's OK to kill 600,000 civilians...women and children.  You make me sick.

[mvpel]

I'll answer your question, Kat, if you answer this one:

Is it right for a genocidal dictator, who used chemical weapons to kill thousands of innocent men, women, children, and infants because some of them opposed his regime, to be able to arm himself with a weapon capable of incinerating a city?

With respect to the 600,000 number you throw out there:

The directors of IBC contend that the researchers' findings, if true, imply several realities that are difficult to explain. They say the study implies that:


1. On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;

2. Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;

3. Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;

4. Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;

5. The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.

In order for all this to be true, the IBC said, one would have to assume massive fraud or incompetence by Iraqi government and health officials and an "abject failutre" of the media, among other things. Without dismissing the report entirely, the IBC qualified its implications as "extreme and improbable."

I mean, household interviews?  Give me a break.

The Iraq Body Count website uses a much more solid methodology not subject to skewing by interviews of terrorist sympathizers, and they have a total of 45,000 to 50,000.  By comparison, Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq documentation for over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq under Saddam Hussein?s regime.

Are people tortured and killed by a brutal dictator less important to you than people killed by accident or by sectarian violence committed by bloodthirsty Muslims no longer under the repressive boot of that dictator?  Is it because only the latter involves the United States military that you care about the deaths of women and children?

Any death of an innocent is a tragedy, and should be avoided at all possible costs, which is how the coalition troops conduct themselves.  The problem is we're dealing with an enemy who thinks nothing of slaughtering children in order to attack soldiers handing out candy.

[Lloyd Danforth]

Iraqies and American soldiers have been dying at a much larger rate in Iraq than they were before our invasion.

[JonM]

This seems like one of those lesser of [insert number] of evils things . . .

[mvpel]

Iraqies and American soldiers have been dying at a much larger rate in Iraq than they were before our invasion.

If you peg Saddam's reign at 24 years, based on the documented numbers from the Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq, Saddam's deliberate executions of civilians came in at 25,000 per year.

This is about 12,000 per year more than the Iraqi Body Count website rate which is based on actual documented sources.

Saddam is estimated to have killed 100,000 people in just the Al-Anfal campaign alone, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, documented with Ba'athist government paperwork and eyewitness accounts:

The full extent of the Iraqi regime's intentions, however, are spelled out with brutal clarity in two directives issued by al-Majid's office in June 1987. Both documents lay out, in the most explicit detail, a prohibition on all human life in designated areas of the Kurdish countryside, covering more than 1,000 villages, to be applied through a shoot-to-kill order for which no subsequent higher authorization is required.

So if you profess to care about innocent lives and individual liberty, then you should support the overthrow of the Saddam regime and the liberation of the Iraqi people, and stand opposed to the thugs and wannabe-tyrants who wish to drag Iraq back down into the black pit of bloody oppression through their attacks on freedom-loving Iraqis and the American and allied soldiers who support them.

[mr.apathy]

So if you profess to care about innocent lives and individual liberty, then you should support the overthrow of the Saddam regime and the liberation of the Iraqi people, and stand opposed to the thugs and wannabe-tyrants who wish to drag Iraq back down into the black pit of bloody oppression through their attacks on freedom-loving Iraqis and the American and allied soldiers who support them.

If the Bush regime cared so much about liberty:
1. Why were the American people not asked if we wanted to invade Iraq?
2. Why were the Iraqi people not asked if they wanted to be invaded?

[paulfife]

So if you profess to care about innocent lives and individual liberty, then you should support the overthrow of the Saddam regime and the liberation of the Iraqi people, and stand opposed to the thugs and wannabe-tyrants who wish to drag Iraq back down into the black pit of bloody oppression through their attacks on freedom-loving Iraqis and the American and allied soldiers who support them.

So is it not valid to support (in spirit) those who with to overthrow Saddam, by agreeing that is a good idea, but to disagree that using the US military to achieve that goal is a bad idea? Seems like throughout history such actions, however well intentioned, always seem to have unintended consequences. How many oppressive governments exist today because of well-intentioned interference in the past?

[mvpel]

We don't live in a Sky Captian world where private corporations with flying aircraft carriers and heavy armaments flit around the globe fighting tyrants.  It'd be nice if the US military didn't need to do it, but debating how many private armies can dance on the head of a pin is of little use to a political dissident being dismembered with a sword for the amusement of Saddam and his henchmen.

An attempted uprising by the Iraqis was brutally crushed by Saddam's regime in the wake of the First Gulf War, after the allied troops stopped short at the behest of the United Nations, resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians and in perhaps a hundred thousand deaths of those fighting against Ba'athist tyranny.

These tyrant-fighters needed our help, and we betrayed them to Saddam's murderers in 1991.  (And you wonder why they hate us?)  It bothers me to see people proposing that we should make the same mistake again.

[Incrementalist]

We don't live in a Sky Captian world where private corporations with flying aircraft carriers and heavy armaments flit around the globe fighting tyrants.  It'd be nice if the US military didn't need to do it, but debating how many private armies can dance on the head of a pin is of little use to a political dissident being dismembered with a sword for the amusement of Saddam and his henchmen.

An attempted uprising by the Iraqis was brutally crushed by Saddam's regime in the wake of the First Gulf War, after the allied troops stopped short at the behest of the United Nations, resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians and in perhaps a hundred thousand deaths of those fighting against Ba'athist tyranny.

These tyrant-fighters needed our help, and we betrayed them to Saddam's murderers in 1991.  (And you wonder why they hate us?)  It bothers me to see people proposing that we should make the same mistake again.

Interesting that you should point out the uprising.  Our assistance to the uprising was not going to be US troops leading the way, it was going to be the same kind of assistance that we gave the mujahideen when they were fighting the USSR in Afghanistan.  If you believe the correct course of action would be covert assistance of a NATIVE uprising, then I'm all for it.  If the US foreign policy was to foster and assist pro-liberty movements worldwide, than I'd find that tolerable.  But the invasion and occupation of Iraq was not that, it was a set agenda piece that was part of the neocon playbook since the late 90's.

Yes, Hussein was a bad guy, but he was at his worst when we had his back.  All those charges being levied against him in the Iraqi courts?  They happened back when we considered him a friend, and we didn't give a rat's ass until he threatened our better friends, the tyrannical house of saud.  Since the UN has been all over him and America spyplanes all around him, he's been effectively neutered.  As of Clinton's second term you could have put his picture in the encyclopedia next to "paper tiger".

[lildog]

It's hard to believe your hypocricy.  Is it right for people to be able to arm themsevles or not?  Why is it right for Americans to arm themselves and not Iraqis?  Because their government may or may not have had weapons, you think it's OK to kill 600,000 civilians...women and children.  You make me sick.

Kat do you believe someone with past convictions of murder and rape or other violent crime should be free to own any weapons of their choice?

[bwisok]

I wanted to interject an observation that would seem to destroy the "good motive" theory of the federales wanting to fight legitimate terror or tyranny elsewhere.  If they were truly interested in conducting that fight with the intention of winning, they would immediately cease the war on drugs and devote those criminal "justice" resources to the war on terror.

Not to mention expunge the criminal records of anyone convicted of purely consensual offenses.  Decriminalizing acts that are not crimes makes it easier to focus on acts or potential acts that are. 

[KBCraig]

It's hard to believe your hypocricy.

It's hard to believe the hypocrisy of those who have been yammering that there were no WMDs, demanding proof, and then attacking the messenger who provides it.

[Lloyd Danforth]

Iraq could have been full of WMD's and we still had no right to invade.  We could justify invading most 3rd world countries if tyrants and weapons were the criteria.  We need to pull our military and foriegn aid money out of the rest of the world and consentrate on how we're going to maintain our rights and still protect ourselves dometically from people seeking revenge for more than a century of screwing with other nations.