US pulls website containing Saddam's nuclear secrets

America’s top intelligence official took down a government website with captured Saddam Hussein-era Iraqi documents, after questions were raised about whether it provided too much information about making atomic bombs.

In a statement last night, a spokesman for National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said his office has suspended public access to the website “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing".

The action came after The New York Times raised questions about the contents of the government site, called the “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal".

The Times’ website reported on Thursday night that weapons experts say documents posted on the government site in recent weeks provide dangerous detail about Iraq’s covert nuclear research before the 1991 Gulf war.

“While strict criteria had already been established to govern posted documents, 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,” said Negroponte’s spokesman, Chad Kolton.

Former White House chief of staff Andrew Card said today that top officials knew there were risks when they decided to post the documents.

“John Negroponte warned us that we don’t know what’s in these documents, so these are being put out at some risk, and that was a warning that he put out right when they first released the documents,” Card told NBC’s Today show.

Pressed by Republican members of Congress, Negroponte’s office last March ordered the unprecedented release of millions of pages of Iraqi documents, most of them in Arabic, collected by the US government over more than a decade.

Until this week, the information had been posted gradually on public internet servers, run by the military. In announcing the postings, Negroponte’s office said the US government had made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, their factual accuracy or the quality of any translations, when available.

The International Atomic Energy Agency declined to comment today on the report.

A spokesman for the chief US envoy to the nuclear agency, Gregory L. Schulte, denied that he was approached by agency officials about the posted documents.

“Ambassador Schulte did not receive any protest or expression of concern from the IAEA on this issue,” spokesman Matthew Boland told The Associated Press in Vienna, Austria. “No representative of our mission was approached by a representative of the IAEA on this issue.”