Earlier this year, the Bush administration started releasing untranslated documents captured from the Iraq regime online, on an internet site set up to, as the New York Times quoted, "leverage the Internet" to allow avid conservatives to pore through the documents looking for what U.N. inspectors, the C.I.A., a massive U.S. government military hunt and a hundred forty thousand troops were not able to do -- find some evidence, somewhere, anywhere, that Hussein's weapons programs were continuing forward after they were shut down in 1991 by the first Gulf War.

It was among the more moronic of efforts -- it made no sense from the beginning, except as desperate partisan hackery -- done after public pressure from the GOP in congress, which in turn was based on a groundswell of outrage from (sigh) conservative pundits, bloggers and other far-far-right Republican acolytes that these documents were not being translated speedily enough, and so they should be released to the public so that the public (meaning desperate GOP supporters with time to kill) could pore through them themselves, looking for any shreds of political advantage in the trove.

Now, nobody really expected that these documents contained anything terribly meaningful. The evidence on the ground has demonstrated, through actual fact, that the weapons programs had indeed been shut down. The whole point of the exercise was a political one. But as it turns out, mixed in with those documents have been documentation of Iraq's previous weapons programs, including instructions for how to make Sarin nerve gas and, now, detailed explorations of how to make a nuclear weapon.

Ask yourself this. Would the administration have actually released these, had they known or even suspected that such information was in them?

If the answer is no, that tends to demonstrate the salient point -- that the administration presumed there was nothing damning to find in these documents, but released them as political ploy to momentarily shut their critics up.

If the answer is yes -- that they thought there were important, sensitive documents buried here, documents that dealt with nerve gas and nuclear weapons -- then doesn't that say something worse, that they were willing to release all those documents to the public (and to other nations) without even a cursory vetting, after pressure from GOP groups?

Once again, we're faced with only two possible choices. Either the Bush administration sabotaged national security through incompetence -- or via partisan malice.

