Full Disclosure

Some may recall that in the mid-90's there was an uproar from the civil "watchdog" types about the dangers contained within one Anarchist Cookbook — a sort of Guy Fawkes how-to guide for fans of Bad Religion. The book had actually been published in 1970, in samizdat form, as an anti-government protest to the Vietnam War, but it didn't really catch on until cyberspace made it widely downloadable. What was the big deal, anyway? In the AC you could find detailed instructions in how to make napalm in your bathtub, how to make dynamite in your woodshed, etc. In the Clinton era, the next great existential threat to these shores was thought to be homegrown. The Unabomber was using crude, MacGuyver-like technology to blow limbs off the wealthy corporate types. The Alfred P. Murrah building lay in smoldering ruins in Oklahoma City, thanks to two enterprising young fascists. Tim Robbins was also a bit worried. Then Columbine happened and a tipping point was reached. Could we afford to tolerate one-man militia field manuals at such a moment of crisis? Did the public have a right to learn how to make weapons of even relatively minor destruction, let alone procure them?

These were the dire questions being asked years before before box cutters had become the preferred implements of mass murder. Yet when all the chat show fury and Senate subcommittee alarmism quietened down, we found we could continue to loose all sorts of dangerous information without living in a constant state of Apocalypse Soon.

Now comes news that the U.S. government, at the prodding of Republicans in Congress, has not vetted captured documents and intelligence from Iraq before posting it on the web for bloggers and the new breed of I.F. Stones to analyze. The result has been the inevitable round of "Oh, shit."

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

“For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible,” said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear arms program. “There’s a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so.”

Well, it's not as if Osama didn't have his own personal centrifuge consultant in A.Q. Khan up until a short while ago. And if the Turbaned One is sifting through countless .gov URLs to find such hot epistemology on how to destroy the world, then I suppose we should be grateful that someone out there is doing his homework.

I can already hear the keyboards feverishly chirping away at the headquarters of MoveOn.org and Antiwar.com: "Ha! The greatest irony of all in this dirty war is that by taking out Saddam we've finally enabled him to build WMD — everywhere except in Iraq!"  I wonder why these schematics for nuclear and chemical weapons were being kept by the Ba'ath. Everyone knows the regime was "contained" and harmless. Something to remind Chemical Ali of the good old days, perhaps?

The real story is that there are 48,000 boxes of Iraqi state documents that no one in Washington seems to be eager to dig through himself. Three years after their seizure and we're just now finding out that contents might be deemed inappropriate for some viewers. The investigations shouldn't be into whether prewar intelligence was doctored and distorted — it should be into whether anyone's bothered to look into the postwar stuff. "'Reviewing the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy intelligence analysts,' [some intelligence officials] argued." What the hell else are they up to at Langley these days?

Yet it is still given as an absolute certainty that Saddam was not in fact up to no good since Gulf War I, even as we continue to excavate more data about his wretched regime and even as discoveries from its archives continue to grab front-page headlines.

Bush and the war planners may have fashioned plenty of rods for their own backs, but so have those who presume to know everything there is to know about Iraq's long-term plans until 2003.