As you've been reading this morning, the gist of
the story is that after toppling Saddam and such, we seized loads and loads of documents. This documents were then posted, despite at least some minor upset, on the internet at the behest of Bush, his friends, and also conservatives bloggers in an attempt to disseminate the information to the public to help in translation, all in the hopes of finding proof of WMD info, links to Al-Qaeda, etc.
The documents turned up information on the capabilities of pre-Gulf War Iraq weaponry and in the midst of pumping all the documents onto the web, documents that essentially detailed how to make an atomic bomb, instructions that are more far detailed than what is already readily available on the internet (shit that really shouldn't be publicly available), also ended up, on the web where anyone could read them.
Critics from the left and right are jumping on this and I've read some of the more informative, background providing sites (on the left), and this is the premise. On the left, you have critics jumping on the fact that this information, instead of being scrutinized by those in the intelligence community, were simply thrown up onto the web in an effort to start a scavenger hunt by conservative bloggers and other's in their camp to find the golden nugget in the midst of all the information that would provide after-the-fact proof of a link Saddam/Al-Qaeda link, proof of current WMD's, etc.
On the right, from what I've read, there are two points being made.
1. That the NYTimes, again in typical liberal treasonous fashion, have again published information that is damaging to the security of the United States by reporting the fact that sensitive nuclear information was published on the web for all to see.
2. That the documents themselves are proof of the threat.
However, as I was reading this great post on this subject at Sadly, No!, I came across a comment that really seemed to sum up the only response anyone on the left really needs to be concerned with at this point when countering critics of both the NYTimes' article, as well as the release of these documents in general.
Mrgumby2u
Some variation of this has been popping us ever since the invasion..."just wait til we translate all these documents, then you'll see the proof of WMD, the al-Qaeda/Saddam connection, yadda yadda yadda." This always just underlines, though, that they didn't have any proof of any of these things before the war; they were just attacking Saddam on what they wanted/believed to be true, on faith, and hoping the the evidence would pop up later. Why does anybody find this an acceptable way to conduct business?
That's a very real concern and one especially felt by an entire hoard of people in the US who have been following the build-up to the war, it's commencement, and subsequent failings, set-backs, and progress. That the US rushed to war on unsolid intelligence on the whims of a dream that "X, Y, and Z would all be proven
after the fact," thus vindicating any of the "stay-the-coursers" who stuck by the President and his yes-men throughout the entire ordeal.
Let's suppose things do turn out in their favor and we find irrefutable evidence of current nuclear programs that were underway that offered the potential of imminent construction of viable nuclear weapons that when clustered with inter-continental ballistic missiles (which Iraq doesn't have), would have posed an imminent nuclear threat to our mainland. Would the risk taken have been worth it? Why yes, I guess in a way it would be.
Yet as it turned out, amidst cries from leading terrorism and weapons inspectors, amidst skepticism from various countries around the world, there was a voice as equally strong as those promoting war that were asking for more time to investigate the claims, the intelligence, and suggesting that we proceed cautiously before we just jump into a war situation that we obviously didn't plan properly for.
So to jump back to the referenced comment above and the question the commentor poses:
Why does anybody find this an acceptable way to conduct business?
I don't know. I certainly don't. Perhaps in venture capitalism or maybe in starting a business, there are certain knowns and unknowns that you have to deal with from conception to going live with your plans. That's the risk when dealing with money, business, commerce, etc.
Starting a war, however, is not an area where you go in with the hopes of finding the proof you need to justify your past actions after the fact. This is war. People die, cities are destroyed, lives are ruined and tossed into the mix, violence flares, innocents get dragged into a situation they may not want to be a part of, economies can be affected. War affects on a global scale. And war is not something you just jump into without weighing the risks beforehand, much like a business.
Granted there are exceptions, such as when the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor. That's not to say we should simply sit by idly until we are physically attacked on our own continent or through our own overseas interests. It's merely that we need to weigh our reaction by the actions of others. And although some on the right will harmoniosly chant that message together (Clinton ignored those actions, The USS Cole, sanctions that went unheeded against Saddam), ultimately, when we were attacked by Al-Qaeda on 9/11, we knew who the enemy was. That enemy remains on the run, labelled as unimportant and irrelevant by prominent right-wing pundits as well as the President, whose very existence has now been trumped exponentially by a need to "succeed" in Iraq, despite Saddam not having attacked us, no solid proof to date showing he had an active and current WMD program, and no apparent ties to either Al-Qaeda or 9/11.
Ultimately, what the Times article tells us is that due to an atmosphere of arrogance to prove a point, to justify their actions after the fact, the administration took these boxes of Iraqi documents and simply dumped them onto anyone with an internet connection to go through, looking for that proverbial 'needle-in-a-haystack' that would ultimately prove them right. Information that could and certainly would end up in the hands of people looking for the same ends, yet who may or may not be trained personnel with the United States government, it's intelligence agencies, or it's allies. This is a recipe chock full of ingredients for disaster, the least of which is manipulation of any information found that may be damning or incriminating to actions upon some of our own key allies.
It was also the ultimate quantum leap. Unfortunately however, Scott Bakula is nowhere to be found.
The worst of which may be the release of some information that actually poses a very real threat to our own national security, due to the information contained within.
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.
...
The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory failure.
This is the precipice of the "heckuva job" administration and if nothing else provides the spotlight on this administrations ability or inability to protect us, despite all their rhetoric of that very fact, one simply needs to point to this and see what they're really capable of.