The Nuclear Bomb That Wasn't (NYT)

[struggle4progress]

<snip> The foundation for the administration's claim that it acted on an honest assessment of intelligence analysis - and the president's frequent claim that Congress had the same information he had - has been steadily eroded by the reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 commission. A lengthy report in The Times on Sunday removed any lingering doubts.

The only physical evidence the administration offered for an Iraqi nuclear program were the 60,000 aluminum tubes that Baghdad set out to buy in early 2001; some of them were seized in Jordan. Even though Iraq had a history of using the same tubes to make small rockets, the president and his closest advisers told the American people that the overwhelming consensus of government experts was that these new tubes were to be used to make nuclear bomb fuel. Now we know there was no such consensus. Mr. Bush's closest advisers say they didn't know that until after they had made the case for war. But in fact, they had plenty of evidence that the claim was baseless; it was a long-discounted theory that had to be resurrected from the intelligence community's wastebasket when the administration needed justification for invading Iraq.

The tubes-for-bombs theory was the creation of a low-level C.I.A. analyst who got his facts, even the size of the tubes, wrong. It was refuted within 24 hours by the Energy Department, which issued three papers debunking the idea over a four-month period in 2001, and by the International Atomic Energy Agency. A week before Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he warned of an Iraqi nuclear menace, international experts in Vienna had dismissed the C.I.A.'s theory about the tubes. The day before, the International Atomic Energy Agency said there was no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program and rejected the tubes' tale entirely.

It's shocking that with all this information readily available, Secretary of State Colin Powell still went before the United Nations to repeat the bogus claims, an appearance that gravely damaged his reputation. It's even more disturbing that Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, had not only failed to keep the president from misleading the American people, but had also become the chief proponents of the "mushroom cloud" rhetoric. <snip>

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=post&forum=103


How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence
By DAVID BARSTOW, WILLIAM J. BROAD and JEFF GERTH
Published: October 3, 2004

<snip> Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery rockets.

The White House, though, embraced the disputed theory that the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, an idea first championed in April 2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A. Senior nuclear scientists considered that notion implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the centrifuge theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.

Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, an examination by The New York Times has found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public. <snip>

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/international/middleeast/03tube.html

[Brotherjohn]

1. This is great timing. We here have all known it for two years, but...

... the general public as a whole just heard the Bush administration say "mushroom cloud" and have been hiding under a desk ever since.

It was clear from the beginning to anyone who was paying attention, and not cowed by fear of another 9-11 (or a desire for revenge for the first), that the administration was misleading the nation about the evidence they had showing Iraq to be a WMD threat. This was particularly clear regarding the alleged threat from nuclear weapons, the threat which was particularly, well, most threatening.

This was their "big gun" used to say "we must act NOW". Their most inflammatory and urgent rhetoric concerned "mushroom clouds" and the threat of terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons. Yet it was based primarily on two things: the bogus Niger-uranium deal, and the aluminum tubes. The Niger-uranium deal was shown to be bunk long ago (although a few die-hards still hold on to the claim by the Brits that they had another source for the claim, which of course they won't release). But the aluminum tubes case was also full of holes, and was long overdue for a re-examination.

As the NYT points out, the tubes were the ONLY piece of physical evidence the administration had to make their case for an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. That this evidence was weak, and completely debunked by our own best experts and the I.A.E.A, BEFORE the war, is a fact that is extremely pertinent to this election. Especially since the administration wss saying that the tubes were "only suitable" for nuclear wepons production, a clear lie. Kudos to the NY times for releasing this extensive investigation into the matter before the election.