Sunday, November 05, 2006

 

A Story with Several Interpretations

I'll start with what I have heard or read of the story. On NPR a day or two ago I heard that information that had been on a DOD web site for several months had been taken down. The information was in Arabic and had been obtained from Iraq after the American troops occupied the Iraq government offices. The information had been taken to the Pentagon and given to translators. The Pentagon doesn't have very many Arabic to English translators, and the process of translation was going to take several years. Congress passed a law or resolution asking the Pentagon to post the untranslated material on the DOD web site so that other scholars in the country could translate it. After several months, it was reported that the information posted contained information about how to construct atomic weapons. The material was taken down.

Here are some reactions to the story:

My friend H wrote:
Some time in the past I talked about how we can be blind to some facts. Al, S****, and S*****, would you agree the bad guys in the Middle East want the Dems to win?

Just today, it came out that (I think a Rep) Congressman put pressure on the GB Ad to publish a document on the web from Iraq which shows in great detail how to build an an atomic bomb. To me I would say the Dems have been making a big deal about not finding WMD but are blind to the fact that they were all prepared to so.

I think Rice found out about it and had to taken off the web.
H


My friend M wrote:
Not quite right. It really goes like this:

There were tens of thousands of documents seized from the regime of Saddam. The DOD wasn't really too excited about expending the time of translators to go through these docs, because there was more recent communications that the DOD wanted to have the translators review. Senator Rick Santoram led a group of Republican legislator to get these documents published on the web so that independent translators could work on them. The goal was to put to bed the mantra Bush Lied, People Died. There were explicit directions given to DOD NOT to post anything sensitive.

Well some weenie at DOD didn't understand and posted instructions how to make a nuclear weapon along with the trigger mechanisms and other highly classified details. Note! This was from documents captured from the Iraqis (who weren't even close to getting WMD) or so say the Dems!

So, what does the NYT print? We're sorry, Saddam really was a threat and was closr to getting WMD's, and Bush was right to take him out? NOOOOOOOOOOOO! They print, "See, see, see, those filthy Republicans are leaking nuclear secrets"!

I am just sick and tired of the biased nut wing (with a left hand thread) media. Why don't they all just put on their DNC membership buttons and be done with it. They won't wear American flags, no that would show bias. What A**H*** hypocrites.

M


My Question: These were untranslated documents in Arabic. The "weenie at DOD" didn't understand Arabic, so how was he to know what the documents were about? If he had known Arabic, he would have understood and translated the documents and so wouldn't have needed to post them. I would put the blame on the "weenie in Congress" who advocated posting the documents and some high official in the Pentagon who went along with the crazy stunt.

It's interesting that neither H nor M, both ardent Republicans, attach any blame to the Republicans in Congress for this fiasco. They both twist the story to blame the Democrats for -- doubting the claim of WMD and opposing Bush's Iraq War.
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