Iraq's Nukes - Remedial Reading Comprehension For Wingnuts

The uber-right is in a kerfuffle over a NY Times report that says the U.S. government posted detailled plans for nukes, captured in Iraq, on the web. Look, they cry with one voice, there were WMD's after all!

Here's the passage they are hanging their hats on:

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.

Now admittedly the NY Times doesn't help with poorly constructed sentences here, but the sense is pretty plain. The plans date to the 1990's and that was when Iraq was a year or so from a nuke. By 2002 the plans were dug out again to prove to international inspectors the program had been dismantled. The documents are dated 1995.

Which is exactly what every other sensible report has said. Iraq had a program at one time but by the time of the Bush II invasion it didn't. Poppa Bush and Bill Clinton's policies of containment had already made it mission accomplished before a shot was fired.

(The rest of the Times article makes all this plain but rightwing bloggers aren't quoting the bits that say so and if there's one thing I've learned in almost two years of blogging it is that most wingnut readers don't follow links - they accept as gospel the message from the machine.)

Now that is cleared up, can we concentrate on the lunatic incompetence of an administration that posts detailled plans for a nuclear weapon on the web, without checking to see what it is doing?