Minister of Science and Chief Protector of the Faith

Saturday, November 04, 2006

Torture? Sensitive national security secrets! Nuclear weapons technology? Not so much.

Torture? Sensitive national security secrets!

U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons
Court Is Asked to Bar Detainees From Talking About Interrogations


The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26. Washington Post via AMERICAblog


Nuclear weapons technology? Not so much.

Scientists protested Web site nuclear data
Scientists at a U.S. weapons lab complained more than two weeks ago that captured Iraqi documents containing sensitive nuclear information were available on the Web site that the government shut down on Thursday, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

Managers at the security administration passed the warning to their counterparts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversaw the Web site, the Times said, citing the official. And as a result, according to a nuclear weapons expert, the government pulled two nuclear papers from the Web site last month. The dangers of the documents, which were captured during the war, had been recognized at Livermore and in the wider community of government arms experts, he said.
[...]
The Bush administration set up the Web site in March at the urging of Republicans in Congress who said that public access to such materials from Iraq could increase the understanding of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein. It was shut down after the Times inquired about the disclosure of nuclear information and the experts' complaints. Among documents posted were roughly a dozen that nuclear weapons experts said constituted a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

While Democrats have called for an investigation, the scientists' two-week-old complaints, as outlined by federal officials on Friday, indicated for the first time that warnings about the site had come from the government's own arms experts as well as from international weapons inspectors, the report said. news.yahoo.com

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