
This is really dumb. My guess is that the NYT was so Pissed with a capital P at John Kerry for nearly @#$^ing everything up that they pulled two consecutive sophomore year-like all nighters just to try and come up with an October Surprise, one day late. Sometime after the third pizza, fourth pot of coffee, and second trip to vomit in the toilet a lightbulb brightens over one cub reporter’s head. He runs to tell his boss:
Cub Reporter ‘Wormwood’: “Master…master…when I was in high school ten years ago, my friends and I pieced together the instructions to make a nuclear bomb through open-source material on the internet. We can blame the Bush administration for that!!!”
Editor ‘Screwtape’: “Most excellent. If the Bush administration had not published these files then we could blame them for being obstructionists! And who cares if the time-line is all wrong, that the Iranian weapons program long pre-dates any of this, or that it really doesn’t matter because the real issue isn’t knowing how to build a nuclear bomb, it’s precuring the material to construct it! Bwahaha!”
Of course, the real story here is that Iraq did indeed have a nuclear weapons program. Such a program may have also included, for arguments sake, attempts to buy yellow-cake uranium from certain African nations that rhyme with “pliger”. Don’t hold your breath for that headline though.