Declared (Nuclear) Threat Grew, As Support for It Eroded

[Newsjock]

In Sunday's Washington Post -- I'll edit with a link as soon as it's on their website. The story weighs in at a whopping 143 inches!

By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus=
(c) 2003, The Washington Post=

WASHINGTON — His name was Joe, from the U.S. government. He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush administration.

An engineer turned CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S. government case that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to the U.S. diplomatic mission downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above the Danube River, he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a serious mistake.

At the time, Iraq was trying to buy high-strength aluminum tubes. IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, had uncovered strong evidence that Iraq was using them for conventional rockets. But the U.S. government said those tubes were for something more serious: centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb.

Joe described the rocket story as a transparent Iraqi lie. According to people familiar with his presentation, which circulated before and afterward among government and outside specialists, Joe said the specialized aluminum in the tubes was ``overspecified,'' ``inappropriate'' and ``excessively strong.'' No one, he told the inspectors, would waste the costly alloy on a rocket.

... The new information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their subordinates — in public and behind the scenes — made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied.

lots more