ASCII of MASS DESTRUCTION

About ASCII of Mass Destruction

American search teams never found evidence of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. But they did uncover some boxes of old documents relating to nuclear weapons.

Among these documents are some typographic Iraqi renderings of American nuclear research. The artist has undertaken a restoration of the distorted Google cache of one of the documents. Although the Iraqi national history museums were looted and destroyed in the first days of the US invasion, this exemplar of late 20th-century Iraqi ASCII art has been saved.

All Arabic texts embedded in the original document, NMEC-2006-610377-ELC.PDF, have been replaced with Arabic transliterations¹ of three lies told by George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq; namely:

We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.
— Donald Rumsfeld

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
— George W. Bush

We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.
— Dick Cheney

Background

As reported November 3rd, 2006, by the New York Times, the U.S. federal government has been freely distributing atomic bomb research done before the first Gulf War in Iraq. Right-wing bloggers have tried to distort the issue and say that this proves that Iraq was "on the verge" of making nuclear weapons. But as Hans Blix, Mohammed el-Baradei, and others have testified, the research trail for atomic weapons appears to stop in 1991.

From the OIFD website

Foreign Military Studies Office Joint Reserve Intelligence Center

Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents

At the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office has created this portal to provide the general public with access to unclassified documents and media captured during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The US 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. The ODNI press release and public affairs contact information is available at http://www.odni.gov/

It's curious that an administration that has sworn it is waging war to protect Americans from weapons of mass destruction would publish information about how to make them. Whereas — in 2006 — the FBI continues to withhold 10 documents in John Lennon's FBI file on grounds that they contain "national security information provided by a foreign government," the Bush administration has declassified nuclear weapons research and published it freely on the Web. It's amazing what passes for "intelligence" in the US government these days.

1. The transliteration was achieved using English-Arabic Transliteration Tool, provided by Yazan Hussain www4.ncsu.edu/~yahussai/A_E/

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