US: The Bush administration closed a government website set up to publicly display pre-war Iraqi documents on weapons of mass destruction after experts said its content included details for building a nuclear bomb, officials said.
The unclassified site was established by US intelligence chief John Negroponte in March under pressure from Republicans, who believed the captured documents would illustrate the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein during an election year marked by increasing voter disaffection over the Iraq war.
But Mr Negroponte's office shut down the site, known as the "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal", after the New York Times informed the Bush administration about expert concerns over posted accounts of Iraq's nuclear research before the 1991 Gulf War. The New York Times reported that the site's contents in recent weeks had begun to "constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb".
Mr Negroponte's office said yesterday that it had suspended access to the site "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing".
It continued: "The material currently on the website, as well as the procedures used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed before the site becomes available again."
US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, when asked about the issue, suggested the controversy supported President Bush's assertion that Saddam harboured dangerous nuclear ambitions before the March 2003 invasion.
"The interesting thing is that there clearly were an awful lot of nuclear documents floating around Iraq which suggest that this is someone who'd not given up on his ambitions."
Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, Republican chairman of the House of Representatives intelligence committee and a leading proponent of the Iraq documents' release, said he welcomed the public discussion generated by the debate.
"This only reinforces the value of these documents in understanding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime," he said in a statement.
Independent experts and diplomats expressed shock that the material appeared on a website.
A diplomat affiliated with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said its inspectors were "shocked by the explicitness of the content" and that a senior agency official conveyed the concerns to US diplomats in Vienna. US officials denied that the US ambassador to the IAEA, Gregory Schulte, had received any expression of concern from the IAEA. - (Reuters)