It’s sad…

…how totally not surprised I am by this:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Beyond expressing my resigned lack of shock, I hardly know what else to say. Although, it’s the deepest of ironies that the site was created to mollify the rightwingers who were clamoring for more information after the WMD rationale was looking grim—an irony well-covered by Atrios, Sadly, No!, Oliver Willis, Digby, and Echidne, among others. Basically, it looked like when the Republicans were toiling to justify the invasion, they posted all of this documentation in the hopes that their rabid cult members who were demanding more info would spend the time digging through it all and come up with something they could use:

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, Republicans who lobbied for the data’s release, said it was important that the information be made available quickly to the public, including political “blogs.”

“We’re hoping to unleash the power of the Internet, unleash the power of the blogosphere, to get through these documents and give us a better understanding of what was going on in Iraq before the war,” said Hoekstra, chairman of the House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Awesome. Well done, 101st Fighting Keyboardists.