Under pressure from congressional Republicans, Bush set up public Web site that included plans for making a nuke

Under pressure from congressional Republicans, Bush set up public Web site that included plans for making a nuke by John in DC - 11/02/2006 10:56:00 PM

Remember how the Republicans have always been trying to spend federal dollars on propaganda to convince the American public that the war in Iraq was really going well? Well, one of those projects, you may recall, was to publish tons of found Iraqi documents online so that the conservative blogosphere and conservative pundits could use the documents to bolster the pro-war effort at home.Well, in the Republicans' zeal to push their propaganda campaign against the American people they published the plans for making an atomic bomb.

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....One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.“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.”But what's worse, the Bush administration had been warned about this site last week and refused to shut it down. It was only after the New York Times called last night that Bush finally pulled the plug.

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity.I've got a question for every Republican member of Congress on the campaign trail. Were you involved in this plan to propagandize to the American people that was so shoddy, so forced, so haphazardly thrown together that you gave al Qaeda and every other bad guy the plans for how to nuke New York?Of course, we won't ever have any hearings on this issue, or find out what went wrong, because the Republicans control Congress and they don't hold the Bush administration accountable. They simply pressure Bush to literally hand Al Qaeda and Iran the plans for making a nuclear bomb.In any case, Marilyn Musgrave says gay marriage is a bigger issue than terrorists getting nukes, so I guess we shouldn't care.