From Drudge:

NEW YORK TIMES PLANS EXCLUSIVE STORY ON IRAQ AND RESEARCH OF NUKE BOMB… NEWSROOM SOURCE TELLS DRUDGE: ‘IT WILL LEAD THE PAPER ON FRIDAY… IT SHOULD IGNITE NEWS CYCLES’… DEVELOPING…

So...they’re finally going to point out the fact that Joe Wilson is a dirty liar and that Saddam really was using oil-for-food money from the UN to bribe his way out from under international sanctions and jump-start a nuclear weapons program?

I wouldn’t count on it.  Instead, expect it to be some long-winded narrative about alleged Bush administration failures, all of which will have been covered at-length before but will this time contain new angles and quotes.

Because it’s important that a story like that run right before an election.

Update: Drudge has more now, and it looks like the Times is going to accuse the Bush administration of helping Iran go nuclear:

Federal government set up Web site—Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal—to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war; detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research; a ‘basic guide to building an atom bomb’… Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency fear the information could help Iran develop nuclear arms… contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that the nuclear experts say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums…

Here’s the Times headline for tomorrow: US Helps Iran Get The Bomb.

Well, maybe it won’t be that bad, but probably not by much.

But regardless, this brings up some interesting points:

First, this database of Iraqi documents has been out for quite some time.  Since March of this year.  Since they’ve been released there has been numerous interesting revelations, from Saddam’s connections with al Qaeda to his establishment of an international terror network of his own to his dealings with the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Yet out of all that information (much of it very supportive of the President’s decision to invade Iraq), this is the first “exclusive” the Times has chosen to run on the database, and they’ve picked a negative topic to cover right before an election.

I wonder how long the Times sat on this story?  You know the timing isn’t an accident.  This data has been out for almost eight months already.

Second, isn’t the fact that Saddam had such detailed plans for nuclear technology in his files - evidence that Iran apparently hasn’t been able to get its hands on yet - more support for the President’s decision to invade Iraq?  Certainly the Times won’t be reporting it that way, but for me that’s the real story in all of this.

Update: Here’s the Times article.

It’s about what I expected.  It blames the Bush administration/Republicans for making detailed information on nuclear weapons publicly available.  It totally skirts the fact that:

1. These released documents have revealed numerous ties between Saddam’s regime and terrorism.
2. If Iraq had information on nuclear weapons that Iran hasn’t been able to get yet then that’s more support for the President’s case for war in Iraq.

And then there still lingers the question of why this article about documents that have been publicly available for eight months is just breaking now right before a crucial midterm election.

Which is a rhetorical question, of course.  We know why it broke right before the election.  The Times is a completely partisan organization, and this is the final bid to get the Dems in on the 7th.