This is a very serious question. When you look at the responses today from the GOP over the NYT’s article on the government having nuclear secrets published on the web.
Let’s first look at how the publication of this information came to being:
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.
So we got the Republicans (you know – that party that always accuses the Democrats of living in the past on the Iraq War), releasing all this information to the internet in a strange hope to make their justification for the war return from the realm of fantasy land. To make this even worse, Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, admits this:
These documents also raise several additional issues of interest. First, it is extraordinary that the New York Times now acknowledges that the captured documents demonstrate that ‘[Saddam] Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.’ This only reinforces the value of these documents in understanding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. Only 1 percent of the estimated 120 million pages of captured documents have been reviewed, and we must continue working to promptly understand these materials. If there is concern about Saddam’s nuclear program, there should be similar concern about potential connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda suggested in the documents.
(emphasis mine).
So screw the safety of the world – Republicans got an ax to grind? Think about that – the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is admitting that all the information has not been reviewed, yet the Bush government still chooses to publish it.
But do Republicans feel thankful that the New York Times actually informed them of this serious security breech? Hell no. They feel the New York Times did something wrong:
This morning on NBC, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card excused the Bush administration’s role in posting nuclear weapons secrets on a public web site, and instead blamed the New York Times for having “advertised” the secrets “to the world.”
So I guess that the New York Times should not have reported on this breech and instead let the information remain online for Iran or North Korea to obtain. This is absolutely appalling.
Now let’s sum this up. The Republicans, in a hope to win an argument that has been lost time and time again (including by countless congressional and government reports), allow information to remain on the internet that could put our nation in even more peril. Instead of saying “oops” about this, they go after the very people who brought this breech to life. This proves the Republicans care nothing about American lives. They would risk a nuclear explosion in the United States that could cost us thousands, if not millions of lives just so they have the smallest chance of saying “I told you so”. These are the most disgusting people to ever walk this planet. Hitler was not as bad as these people are.