Government Opens Nukes-r-Us.com

I know, I know, you were rushing around getting ready for work this morning when you overheard on your radio or television something about the Bush administration publishing how-to guides for building nuclear bombs on the Internet and you thought you heard wrong.

You did not.

The New York Times is reporting today that the Bush administration opened a web site called “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” which was designed to show how big a danger Saddam Hussein was in pre-war Iraq. But documents found on the site, according to the Times' report give "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."

“For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible,” said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear arms program. “There’s a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so.”

You can find the New York Times article here and, since I'm steeped in Senate-election stuff and can't do my full homework on this, I'll turn you over to my able blog colleague Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake.

Says Christy:

"Why do Republicans not understand the meaning of the term 'national security secret?'

"Not content with the mere outing of a CIA NOC by her own government, and blowing a whole network of undercover operatives and assets working on WMD issues in the Middle East, including in Iraq and Iran, the Bush Administration took its idiocy a step further: they published documents seized from Iraq online in a big, fat docu-dump as some sort of massive CYA maneuver to shore up support with their right-wing blogger mouthpieces and crazies like Rep. Curt Weldon and Sen. Rick Santorum, who still swear that there are WMDs buried somewhere in the Iraqi sands."

Please go to Firedoglake to read the rest.