You have to chuckle when, in its attack-du-jour on the Bush administration, the NY Times now concedes that Iraq did in fact have a nuclear weapons program. I guess all that "Bush lied!" stuff was just bunk. Of course, the NYT couches this all, as usual, as another blunder by the Bush junta, which would have all of America under its boot if not for the heroic efforts of the almighty Times.

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

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.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”...

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had 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.

Wouldn't it universally be considered to be a rousing success if America had managed to pre-empt the imminent nuclearization of Saddam Hussein, which we managed to foil with only a 12-months margin of safety? Of course, the NYT has to salvage the pretext of the "Bush lied!" calumny so it emphasizes the pre-1991 angle. But what about the Iraq reports written after the Gulf War and as recently as 2002? The NYT is not interested in questioning why these documents were preserved by the regime and discovered in 2003. If the NYT was a genuine news outlet, it would have gone to the Duelfer report (go to pages 44 and 49 in particular), which concluded that Saddam Hussein was retaining the technical knowhow and infrastructure related to WMD so that, once the irredeemably compromised UN sanctions completed their collapse, he could restart his banned weapons programs. But since the NYT is an arm of the DNC and no longer a genuine news outlet, it cannot fully report on that part of the story because it would undermine its own political objectives.

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