Searching for another October surprise

So, clutching at straws, the political blogosphere is making a really big deal over the story that the New York Times had today, about the cache of Iraqi documents that the government posted on a website called "“Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," now shut down.

Turns out the documents included some from Saddam Hussein's pre-1991 nuclear project, with detailed instructions on how to make an atomic bomb. That's 1991...before the first Gulf War. But lots of folks seem to be saying that this is proof of the 2003 pre-invasion reported WMDs. (See Instapundit, for example).

On the other side, check out bloggers like Attytood's Will Bunch, who outlines how bloggers and conservative members of Congress pushed for the documents to be put online in the first place:

It turns out that the Bush administration's unprecendented -- and apparently foolish beyond belief -- decision to agree to post thousands upon thousands of raw and in some cases unexamined or untranslated documents captured in the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the Internet had a very unintended consequence.
...It happened because after the White House invaded a Middle Eastern country based upon a web of lies about weapons of mass destruction and phony ties to al-Qaeda, the neoconservatives were desperate for any shred of evidence that might belatedly prove they were right after all, and enlisted their blogger backers to become amateur WMD Sherlock Holmes'.
...In fact, just as Negreponte and those "overly-cautious" lawyers warned, there really has been no helpful information that's come out of this "swarm." Nada. None. Sadly, No does a good job of chronicling some of the foolish mistranslations and other mishaps that have instead taken place.

Link is missing, but that's Sadly, No, which has links to other bloggers claiming this is proof of WMDs. Also, Digby points to a report that even Condoleeza Rice is making this claim.