New York Times Reveals Saddam Hussein's Iraq Had Nuclear Weapons Plans

Wow.  A last-minute pre-election bombshell at the New York Times.  And it has already gone nuclear.  Jim Geraghty writes:

I'm sorry, did the New York Times just put on the front page that IRAQ HAD A NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM AND WAS PLOTTING TO BUILD AN ATOMIC BOMB?

What? Wait a minute. The entire mantra of the war critics has been  "no WMDs, no WMDs, no threat, no threat", for the past three years solid. Now we're being told that the Bush administration erred by making public information that could help any nation build an atomic bomb.

Let's go back and clarify: IRAQ HAD NUCLEAR WEAPONS PLANS SO ADVANCED AND DETAILED THAT ANY COUNTRY COULD HAVE USED THEM.

I think the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a "Boy, did Bush screw up" meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down the "there was no threat in Iraq" meme, once and for all. Because obviously, Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh... al-Qaeda.

The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivious to it.

Ed Morrissey writes

This is apparently the Times' November surprise, but it's a surprising one indeed. The Times has just authenticated the entire collection of memos, some of which give very detailed accounts of Iraqi ties to terrorist organizations. Just this past Monday, I posted a memo which showed that the Saddam regime actively coordinated with Palestinian terrorists in the PFLP as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. On September 20th, I reposted a translation of an IIS memo written four days after 9/11 that worried the US would discover Iraq's ties to Osama bin Laden.

So let's put some of the puzzle pieces together, shall we?:

Iraq had plans to build nuclear weapons of mass destruction and building such a bomb was as little as a year away, Iraq had already stockpiled 500 tons of yellowcake uranium and was seeking more yellowcake, Iraq had already used chemical weapons of mass destruction, Iraq still had many those older chemical weapons of mass destruction in its possession despite claims to the U.N. that it did not, Iraq was training thousands of Islamic terrorists, Iraq had ties to Osama bin Laden that it feared might be discovered and knew that Iraq was being used as a launching point for Al Qaeda and jihadis fighting the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq was funding suicide bombers in Israel, Iraq was a sworn enemy of the United States, and Iraq was defying U.N. resolutions. 

Thanks, New York Times.  No further questions.

Update:  The Anchoress hits a home run with a post that is both funny and chock-full of facts that the New York Times would just as soon have you forget.

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More commentary at TigerHawk, Captain's Quarters, Michelle Malkin, Instapundit, Wizbang and Stop the ACLU.