NYTimes Confirms Saddam had Detailed Nuke Weapon Plans!!!!!

What about a November Surprise. The New York Times has a story that, hidden in the thousands of pages of documents from Saddam's regime which have yet to be translated, there are documents showing Iraq had detailed, working plans for nuclear weapons, good enough that the IAEA is worried that the declassification and posting could materially advance Iran's program.

From National Review Online:

Shocker: New York Times Confirms Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program

(from drudge):

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.

As Drudge notes, the web site is now shut down, and rightly so. One of the mistakes the Bush Administration made in my opinion was not getting more translaters to dig through these documents to FIND the evidence and shut down the critics of the war.

I understand that proving that Iraq had a weapons program doesn't help us solve the problems we NOW face, and that's why Bush has focused on what lies ahead and not what came behind.

But Bush underestimated the hatred from the left, and their willingness to sabatoge the war effort for their own power. He didn't believe that people elected to serve their country would instead undermine it, so he couldn't understand the value in digging out proof of what he always knew was true, and that no longer mattered.

Unfortunately, that was EXACTLY what we needed to win the war on terror, because without that otherwise wasted effort, we are stuck with John Kerry using our troops as foils for a political joke, for democrats lying about the war, exposing our secrets, and undermining the morale of the troops and the support at home in order to exact political revenge against Bush.

I am glad that the documents were made public, although I'm also happy that they have been taken offline now that we know there's important stuff there. Maybe now we can get some money to really translate these. In the interim, bloggers have been sacrificing their own time to translate the documents.

They have found evidence of Saddam trying to contribute pilots to a "plot" which was supposed to attack the U.S. sometime in 2001, which could well have been 9/11 or the suspected follow-up attack.

They have found documents detailing cheating on weapons inspections, on hiding weapons and weapons components, of transfering weapons around the country and burying them in deserts, and a lot of other things that puts the lie to the democrat spin that Saddam was no danger to us.

Unfortunately, the New York Times waited too long for this to help republicans. This story should have been put out weeks ago, but they were too busy with Foley this and Foley that. Anyway, why would the NYTimes do anything to help the "evil" republicans?

I hope that in the two days left, we can get word out. Fortunately, the democrats should help us, because they will see the danger the story puts them in. I expect they will try to spin this as a "failure" by Bush to "protect our secrets", which would be hilarious given their leaking of classified information left and right. Somehow, they will try to make proof of Saddam's Nuclear Program as a "failure" of the administration to protect us, even though it was the administration that pushed for approval to fight the war that stopped Saddam from being able to develop these weapons himself.

In any case, win or lose, it's good for the world that Saddam isn't still in power. Monday he should be found guilty of a few of his crimes, another event the Democrats will want to hide from the public.

UPDATE: A little more from the actual New York Times article, this from Stop The ACLU:

The New Yorks times confirms that in 2002 Saddam Hussein’s “scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away:”

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

Had the United States not eliminated this threat, today we would be facing a nuclear armed Iraq and possibly a nuclear armed Iran.

Well, after years of listening to Democrats ridiculing the administration about "mushroom clouds" and "false claims of WMD programs", the New York Times, the liberal's paper of record, now says Saddam might have been within a YEAR of having a bomb in 2002.

Thank GOD for President Bush. Maybe I will have to thank God that I was not President, because I opposed the war.