Media reports stated that the website was taken offline because of security concerns regarding the posting of sophisticated diagrams and other information regarding (nuclear weapon) design prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
[2] A spokeswoman for John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence, noted that "Intelligence community analysts from the CIA and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that while fascinating from a historical perspective, the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their postwar analysis of Iraq's weapons programs, nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey Group report.
"[8] The Pentagon cautioned that the government "has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available."
"[11] Other experts have suggested that the problem is that bloggers will cherry-pick information from the documents to solidify their own perspectives without putting the tidbits they find in an overall historical context.
"[6] According to history professor Fritz Umbach, the document archive has been seeded "with suggestive jihadist materials" unrelated to the war in Iraq, and cites specific examples.
In a Salon.com article, Umbach claims to have identified "approximately 40 files that are either completely unrelated to Iraq, or that are related only through jihadist elements of the insurgency that began after Saddam's fall."
Umbach writes, "Whether intentional or not, the conflation and confusion of materials has been more than sufficient to convince bloggers on the political right that there were, as Bush officials insisted, operational links between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaida.
"[12] After the fall of Baghdad, the United States Joint Forces Command commissioned a study of the inner workings and behavior of Saddam's regime, referred to as the Iraqi Perspectives Project.
In particular, the project concluded that: The study also cites documents demonstrating that key evidence presented by Colin Powell to the United Nations in February 2003 had been severely misinterpreted by the U.S. government.
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.
[citation needed] But Joseph Cirincione, director for nonproliferation at the Center for American Progress, pointed out that the Times had not put the documents online: "The journalists are the heroes.