WASHINGTON (AP) -- The top U.S. intelligence official took down a government Web site with captured Saddam Hussein-era Iraqi documents after questions were raised whether it provided too much information about making atomic bombs.

In a statement Thursday night, a spokesman for National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said his office has suspended public access to the Web site "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."

The action came after The New York Times raised questions about the contents of the government site, called the "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal." The Times' Web site reported Thursday night that weapons experts say documents posted on the government site in recent weeks provide dangerous detail about Iraq's covert nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

"While strict criteria had already been established to govern posted documents, 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," said Negroponte's spokesman, Chad Kolton.

I guess Card is still on the payroll.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/11/03/card-blames-nyt/

Frank James | November 3

Chicago Tribune - Today's N.Y. Times story about the White House's decision to make captured Iraqi weapons-development documents publicly available on the Internet, a decision critics said could give scientists in Iran or elsewhere a nuclear-bomb recipe, has made the administration vulnerable to charges from political opponents on what has been its strong suit—national security- only days before the mid-term election.

As the Times reported, the administration put the documents on the Internet after conservatives in Congress and elsewhere pressured them to do so in the hope that members of the public could help intelligence analysts find evidence within them to support claims of supporters of the Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear program.

International proliferation experts had expressed strong concerns about the documents presence on the web site. Andrew Card, the former White House chief of staff, acknowledged that the cautions from some members of the administration were very clear.

The Times story said:

“John Negroponte (the Director of National Intelligence) warned us that we don’t know what’s in these documents, so these are being put out at some risk, and that was a warning that he put out right when they first released the documents,” Mr. Card said on NBC’s “Today” show, according to The Associated Press.

The web site was deactivated yesterday by the U.S. Directorate for National Intelligence which oversees the nation's intelligence agencies, the Times said.

A reporter asked Tony Fratto, White House Deputy Press Secretary about the website when he met with the White House press corps during what's called the gaggle, a sort of pre-briefing that occurs before the day's main briefing

FRATTO: Obviously, there was some -- something unfortunate occurred where certain documents were placed on an Internet site. I know the DNI is dealing with it. They took down the site. They're reviewing the other documents that would be available to be seen on the site, were it still up, and doing the forensic testing to determine who might have accessed those documents since they were posted. And they're also reviewing the procedures to make sure -- to see what happened in this case and to make sure that it doesn't happen again.

I think it is important that we remember, this is a stark reminder of what Saddam Hussein's nuclear ambitions were. He certainly had the know-how, he had scientists who were knowledgeable. And I think that's something just to keep in mind here.

While the White House act of creating the web site is certainly drawing criticism from Democratic partisans, it's also being criticized by someone who is not known generally as a partisan, David Kay, the WMD expert who headed the Iraq Survey Group which the Bush administration formed to search Iraq for WMD post-invasion.

Kay was on Hardball with Chris Matthews this evening. Here's how he responded to Matthews' question about the website.

"It's sheer stupidity. Plus it's illegal. We violated our own treaty obligations in letting this out. This is clearly what is called RD--restricted data. This should not have been out there. It's highly dangerous, it's very useful--even like Iran, which is meeting some of the same technical challenges Iraq met in the Eighties. It should not have been out there. I'm absolutely convinced, and most people don't remember. But we went through this again in the spring. In the spring Congresman (Peter) Hoestra announced with (Sen.) Rick Santorum that we had found WMD in iraq. It was old mustard shells from the 1980s. They're desperate to prove a case."

If that's what someone seen as a straight-shooter like Kay is saying, you can only imagine what Democrats are saying. They have seized the chance to raise further doubts about the Bush administration's effectiveness on security issues, a Democratic group issued a press release this afternoon.

Rand Beers, President of the National Security Network, said today that, "The material posted on this website posed a grave danger to U.S. national security. We served it up for our enemies on a silver platter."

Beers said that, "What makes this even worse, is the political motivation for it. It was done at the behest of Republicans in Congress still stubbornly anxious to prove the discredited notion that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. It is another example," he went on, "of the dangerous incompetence of this Administration and of its rubberstamp Republican Congress. It goes without saying," Beers added, "that we shouldn't be making things easier for terrorists and rogue states who seek to do us harm."

"Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," a U.S. web archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war was shut down yesterday after complaints that the detailed accounts of Iraq's pre-1991 secret nuclear research on the site constitute a primer on how to build an atom bomb. According to the New York Times, the campaign for the creation of the website was led by chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan with his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, and joined by Rick Santorum and Congressional Republicans who wanted to reinvigorate the search for proof that Saddam had resumed his WMD research before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Something the Times story didn't mention is that making such documents available on the Internet ran directly against the general trend of the administration following 9/11 to make documents that could be use by the U.S.'s enemies, less rather than more available.

_{"at some point I'm hopeful I'll figure out something to put here"}

Does anybody know what I'm supposed to do with this pointy part?