U.S. shuts Web site said to reveal nuclear guideFri Nov 3, 2006 5:11pm ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration closed a government Web site set up to publicly display pre-war Iraqi documents on weapons of mass destruction after experts said its content included details for building a nuclear bomb, officials said on Friday.
The unclassified site was established by U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte in March under pressure from Republicans, who believed the captured documents would illustrate the dangers of Saddam Hussein during an election year marked by increasing voter disaffection over the Iraq war.
"Something unfortunate occurred," White House spokesman Tony Fratto told reporters aboard Air Force One as President George W. Bush traveled to Iowa to campaign for Republicans.
Negroponte's office shut down the site, known as the "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," after The New York Times informed the Bush administration about expert concerns over posted accounts of Iraq's nuclear research before the 1991 Gulf War.
But with the November 7 election showdown for control of Congress only days away, Republicans jumped onto the political offensive by suggesting the documents reinforced Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.
"The interesting thing is that there clearly were an awful lot of nuclear documents floating around Iraq which suggest that this is someone who'd not given up on his ambitions," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a radio interview.
EXPLICIT CONTENT
Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee and a leading proponent of the Iraq documents' release, also said he welcomed the discovery. "This only reinforces the value of these documents," he said in a statement.
However, independent experts and diplomats expressed shock at the appearance of the material on a U.S. Web site.
A diplomat affiliated with the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency told Reuters IAEA inspectors were "shocked by the explicitness of the content" on the Web page and that a senior agency official conveyed the concerns to U.S. diplomats in Vienna.
U.S. officials denied that U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA Gregory Schulte had received any protest or expression of concern from the IAEA.
Allegations about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network helped justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. No arsenals of such weapons have been found in Iraq.
The New York Times, which broke the story late on Thursday, reported that the site's contents in recent weeks had begun to "constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb."
Negroponte's office said in a statement on Friday it had suspended access to the site "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."
"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," it said.
Intelligence officials also conducted forensic tests to try to determine who might have accessed the documents.
