Senators Question Posting of Iraqi Nuclear Papers

Four Democratic senators demanded yesterday that the Bush administration explain its decision to post documents from Saddam Hussein's covert nuclear program on a now-shuttered federal Web site.

The lawmakers told President Bush's director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, that it was "shocking that sensitive documents directly related to the design of a nuclear weapon were made public by the executive branch."

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and Sens. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.) also questioned whether political pressure from congressional Republicans played a role.

Negroponte suspended public access to the site Thursday night after the New York Times, preparing an article it published Friday, asked officials whether the site provided too much information on making atomic bombs. Negroponte, who had ordered the documents released, also began a review of the consequences, including who accessed the documents.

Negroponte's spokesman, Chad Kolton, declined to comment on the letter. He noted that Negroponte already has called for a review.

"We disclosed the initiation of a full review of this issue earlier this week," Kolton said by e-mail.

The documents, mostly in Arabic, had been posted since March on a Web site administered by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency and called the Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal.

Administration officials say the site was a repository for millions of pages that the U.S. government found in Iraq in the past 15 years.