You may have seen the
New York Times story about recently declassified Iraqi documents that the Bush Administration put on a Web site as a result of pressure from Congressional Republicans, including Rick Santorum. It turns out some of those hastily declassified documents contained information about nuclear research that basically laid out how to create a nuclear bomb.
In light of those facts, we thought you might like to see the video of Rick's announcement of the web site, in which he takes credit for getting the documents made public and says he's not concerned that any of the information is sensitive, even though he admits to having "no idea" what's contained in the documents. Brilliant! Here's the video (partial transcript below).
We're trying to assure that all the information that we have gathered from the previous regime in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's regime, is being made available to the public as quickly as possible. With a bias toward making this information unclassified and released.
...
And he [President Bush] assured me that they were going to be releasing documents in a steady stream over a period of time. Not picking and choosing documents, but releasing documents, a lot of which will not have been interpreted, out into the Internet for people to see. I think that is a wonderful step forward. There is no question that, as a result of that release, we will be able to get that information analyzed by people all over the world.
...
All of this information is at least three years old and a lot of this information is much older than that. And so there seems to very little concern, at least from my perspective, that this information is sensitive from a classification point of view.
...
The American public has a right to know this information. We have no idea, you know, what - given the volumes of documents we're talking about here, 48,000 boxes of documents - what's in there. But we think it's important that the public get a view.
I'll be glad when he gets his ass handed to him on Tuesday night.
Yes, asshole Santorum, you DID release them to MILLIONS of people all over the world. God damn these traitors to a lake of boiling liquid shit in the bowels of Hell. Losing an election doesn't come close to what these Judas bastards deserve.
And remember, Bush himself personally signed off on this atrocity over the objections of everyone in the intelligence services, FOR POLITICAL REASONS!
They should be tried, convicted and then shot right in front of the Washington Monument.
And what IS in the boxes Slick Rick? Oops! Turns out there's information on how to build a nuclear bomb. My god! These men are beyond stupid, lazy, incompetent, and ignorant combined. They are a f*cking danger to themselves and others, as in THE WHOLE WORLD.
However, there isn't much that's secret about building an a-bomb, if I remember correctly. This information IS already on the internet, and a undergrad senior at Princeton (in physics or engineering) did his senior thesis on the a-bomb design back when (in the '70s, I think). He had no access to any such top secret information, but only to information in the public domain.
The DESIGN is trivial these days. It's the fissionable weapon grade material that's hard to get, and machining the subcritical masses to incredibly fine tolerances requires sophisticated capabilities. As I understand it, these are the two things that are hard about a-bombs, even given knowledge of the proper design.
The
The Communist Youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde dedicated its front page to the Cuban president, printing a blown-up picture of a pensive Castro with the title "Always fighting for something, and fighting with optimism!"
http://mikealao.blogspot.com/
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Reuters
January 19, 2000
U.S. finds nuclear secrets in open archives
WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Hundreds of declassified U.S. government documents at the National Archives, available for public perusal, contained nuclear weapons secrets that mistakenly had been left in, an Energy Department review made public on Wednesday said.
The Energy Department, due to a 1998 law, is reviewing already declassified documents to ensure that nuclear secrets were not inadvertently left in, and issued its first report to Congress shortly before Christmas, an official said.
Energy officials said the declassified documents embedded with nuclear secrets were from U.S. agencies other than the Energy Department, but declined to name them.
The issue of U.S. nuclear secrets has been a hot-button item for Congress since accusations erupted publicly last year that China allegedly obtained information on U.S. nuclear weapons through espionage, a charge that Beijing denies.
Under President Bill Clinton's order, U.S. government documents older than 25 years must be reviewed for declassification.
The Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit group focused on national security issues, posted an unclassified executive summary of the report on its Web site www.fas.org.
"This is stuff that represents information about old weapons, old tests," an Energy Department official familiar with the whole report told Reuters.
Classified information was left in the documents largely due to human error in which reviewers missed markings that showed the information was restricted, the official said.
"These things are of concern because they could be valuable to someone who was trying to develop a nuclear capability," the official said on condition of anonymity.
"I'm not saying that we've discovered anything that gives away the farm ... but there are bits and pieces of information that we've pulled off the shelves that are classified and should not have been there," the official added.
ONE CASE OF "COMPROMISE"
Of 948,000 pages audited by the Energy Department, 14,890 pages included restricted information that should not have been declassified, the report to Congress said.
"I recognize the gravity of these inadvertent releases," Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said in a letter to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner dated Nov. 29, 1999.
Energy Department staff prevented the inadvertent release of nuclear secrets in about 2,250 documents that were in the process of being issued publicly, Richardson said.
There was only one case in which there was "compelling evidence" that classified information was used by a researcher, the report said. That information related to the deployment of nuclear weapons in a foreign country in the early 1950s, rather than nuclear design or production information.
The executive summary of the report said the restricted material inadvertently released included:
-- documents on "nuclear tests that provide insight into the level of weapon design technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s" and nuclear weapon systems that were either retired or never reached production and stockpiling.
-- documents revealing U.S. "nuclear weapon design information from the test results of a specified nuclear test program."
-- documents that provided U.S. nuclear test results of a specified nuclear test, the military and technical basis for atmospheric testing during a specified year, and a specified nuclear device with the specified date of the underground test.
-- documents covering nuclear weapons utilization information such as yields of specific weapons and deployment and storage locations.
-- documents covering nuclear weapons design information for increasing yields and nuclear weapon utilization information such as yields of specified weapons and deployment and storage locations.
The release of such information is of concern because it could benefit U.S. adversaries and "terrorist groups" as older nuclear weapons are easier to construct than current weapons, the report said.
"Nuclear weapons, it's the laws of physics that apply, and a weapon that worked well with a World War Two design would still function today. So there are still parts of the weapons that we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that are classified," the Energy official said.
Copyright © 2000 Reuters Limited.
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