U.S. shuts Web site said to reveal nuclear guideFri Nov 3, 2006
5:11pm ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration closed a government
Web site set up to publicly display pre-war Iraqi documents on
weapons of mass destruction after experts said its content included
details for building a nuclear bomb, officials said on
Friday.
The unclassified site was established by U.S. intelligence chief
John Negroponte in March under pressure from Republicans, who
believed the captured documents would illustrate the dangers of
Saddam Hussein during an election year marked by increasing voter
disaffection over the Iraq war.
"Something unfortunate occurred," White House spokesman Tony Fratto
told reporters aboard Air Force One as President George W. Bush
traveled to Iowa to campaign for Republicans.
Negroponte's office shut down the site, known as the "Operation
Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," after The New York Times informed
the Bush administration about expert concerns over posted accounts
of Iraq's nuclear research before the 1991 Gulf War.
But with the November 7 election showdown for control of Congress
only days away, Republicans jumped onto the political offensive by
suggesting the documents reinforced Bush's rationale for invading
Iraq.
"The interesting thing is that there clearly were an awful lot of
nuclear documents floating around Iraq which suggest that this is
someone who'd not given up on his ambitions," Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice said in a radio interview.
EXPLICIT CONTENT
Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Republican chairman of the House
of Representatives Intelligence Committee and a leading proponent
of the Iraq documents' release, also said he welcomed the
discovery. "This only reinforces the value of these documents," he
said in a statement.
However, independent experts and diplomats expressed shock at the
appearance of the material on a U.S. Web site.
A diplomat affiliated with the watchdog International Atomic Energy
Agency told Reuters IAEA inspectors were "shocked by the
explicitness of the content" on the Web page and that a senior
agency official conveyed the concerns to U.S. diplomats in
Vienna.
U.S. officials denied that U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA Gregory
Schulte had received any protest or expression of concern from the
IAEA.
Allegations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links
between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network helped
justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. No arsenals of such weapons
have been found in Iraq.
The New York Times, which broke the story late on Thursday,
reported that the site's contents in recent weeks had begun to
"constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb."
Negroponte's office said in a statement on Friday it had suspended
access to the site "pending a review to ensure its content is
appropriate for public viewing."
"The material currently on the Web site, as well as the procedures
used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed before the
site becomes available again," it said.
Intelligence officials also conducted forensic tests to try to
determine who might have accessed the documents.
