White House Lied About Iraq Nuclear Programs

An anonymous reader writes "This New York Times article reports that in 2002, the Bush Administration's assertions that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program were based on evidence that was doubted by the government's foremost nuclear security experts. Specifically, aluminum tubes most likely meant for small artillery rockets were interpreted by the administration as parts for uranium centrifuges." In a nutshell: while Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld were announcing to the American public that these tubes were slam-dunk evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions, they already knew that there was completely overwhelming evidence that the tubes were just for artillery rockets (as Iraq said) and that the tubes were totally unsuitable for use in centrifuges.

Comments

Re:Contempt of Congress

[beldraen]

Yes and no. The President is bound by all laws, but he cannot be tried while in office. He must either finish his position in office or be impeached and removed from office before he can be tried; however, it seems to be standing policy by each new president to pardon the previous president, as each wants the same from the following president. I wouldn't count on Bush being tried in a court of law unless he personally killed someone, in cold blood, with 10 witnesses, and was caught grinning into the camera.

michael's madness

[Anonymous Coward]

Michael: When you rip off posts from Drudgereport.com, The New Scientist and other well-read sites, make sure you follow the thread through to the point where they explain that the story was nothing more than a political hit piece.

For instance, check out an earlier NY Times piece that actually reinforces the administration's position. Or you could review that this hit piece was to be joined by CBS News in another attempted effort to push fraudulant information and sucker all the sheep out there.

Or should we expect a post from you about "critical national guard documents damage Bush" and experience a deja vu Slashdot experience?

Slashdot readers - you too can read it before Michael (or some alleged anonymous reader, just like the CBS anonymous sources) reads it and makes up a libelous headline damaging Slashdot credibility and objectivity:

Drudge Report
The New Scientist

and other excellent critical reads include:

Power Line
Weekly Standard
Little Green Footballs

Oh... I should warn you - if you're determined to vote for Kerry in spite of everything, do NOT go to the any of the above sites. It'll destroy any opportunity for ignorance you might have.

Re:High tolerance tubes

[sweatyboatman]

as the NY Times article points out, similar quality aluminum is found in tin cans and other commercial products. And the same material (with similar specs) was used to make rockets for the US Military.

If you RTFA it's very clear that the tubes would be completely useless in a nuclear program. And that the specs were consistent with the Iraqi army's requirements for these rockets.

And, as the article shows, all this was known to the current administration months before the Iraq war began.

Great reporting by the Times. Very eye-opening.

So the argument that Sadam was developing nuclear weapons was based on the discredited Yellowcake report from Niger. And on these aluminum tubes. Both of which were known to be suspect before the war began.

Re:High tolerance tubes

[OWJones]

I read this story Saturday evening and the tubes that Iraq was shopping for were of a much greater tolerance than needed for their small artilery rockets.

Wrong wrong wrong WRONG!!!!

From the story:

It turned out, they reported, that Iraq had for years used high-strength aluminum tubes to make combustion chambers for slim rockets fired from launcher pods. Back in 1996, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency had even examined some of those tubes, also made of 7075-T6 aluminum, at a military complex, the Nasser metal fabrication plant in Baghdad, where the Iraqis acknowledged making rockets. According to the international agency, the rocket tubes, some 66,000 of them, were 900 millimeters in length, with a diameter of 81 millimeters and walls 3.3 millimeters thick.

The tubes now sought by Iraq had precisely the same dimensions - a perfect match.

That finding was published May 9, 2001, in the Daily Intelligence Highlight, a secret Energy Department newsletter published on Intelink, a Web site for the intelligence community and the White House.

[...]

But that made no sense, they argued in a new report, because Iraq wanted tubes made at tolerances that "far exceed any known conventional weapons." In other words, Iraq was demanding a level of precision craftsmanship unnecessary for ordinary mass-produced rockets.

More to the point, those analysts had hit on a competing theory: that the tubes' dimensions matched those used in an early uranium centrifuge developed in the 1950's by a German scientist, Gernot Zippe.

[...]

Over and over, the reports restated Joe's main conclusions for the C.I.A. - that the tubes matched the 1950's Zippe centrifuge design and were built to specifications that "exceeded any known conventional weapons application." They did not state what Energy Department experts had noted - that many common industrial items, even aluminum cans, were made to specifications as good or better than the tubes sought by Iraq. Nor did the reports acknowledge a significant error in Joe's claim - that the tubes "matched" those used in a Zippe centrifuge.

The tubes sought by Iraq had a wall thickness of 3.3 millimeters. When Energy Department experts checked with Dr. Zippe, a step Joe did not take, they learned that the walls of Zippe tubes did not exceed 1.1 millimeters, a substantial difference.

To sum up: a low-level analyst found an old centrifuge design that he thought the Iraqis were copying. He ignored the fact that the tubes were an exact match of rockets the Iraqis used earlier, and didn't even bother to ask the inventor of the original centrifuge whether or not the tubes could be used in that centrifuge.

End of story, WRT the "much greater tolerance" line.

-jdm

Scott Ritter

[hankaholic]

Google for Scott Ritter sometime.

Scott Ritter was a U.S. Marine who served in the Gulf war and acted as chief inspector of the United Nations Special Commission to disarm Iraq (UNSCOM). He resigned his role as chief inspector after the CIA was caught trying to into the inspection teams in 1998.

In an interview with Paula Zahn, one of the United States' leading experts on Iraqi weapons programs left no question as to his feelings on the justification for war:

RITTER: What makes them convinced? What evidence do they have? We're talking about going to war here, Paula. [...] So frankly speaking, I'm going to need a hell of a lot more than some aluminum tubes before I'm convinced there's a case for war. The bottom line is in 1998 the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iraq had no nuclear weapons capability, none whatsoever, zero. So how suddenly are they now an emerging nuclear threat? We'd better have a heck of a lot more to go on than some aluminum pipes.

ZAHN: Let's talk more about what some say is the only independent voice in this whole argument, and that is the International Institute for Strategic Studies. And you just cited the study. In this report, it suggests -- and this report is just out this morning -- that Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months if it had foreign help.

Let me read to you what the conclusion was, that, "War sanctions and inspections have reversed and retarded but not eliminated Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and long range missile capabilities, nor removed Baghdad's enduring interest in developing these capabilities."

RITTER: Paula, what do we have here? Rhetoric? Where's the facts? Enduring interest in weapons capability? What does that mean? What evidence do they cite for this enduring interest? You know, ballistic missiles, they say he has 12. What, did they grow? Where are they? They didn't have 12 when I was a weapons inspector.

Chemical weapons? Biological weapons? They talk about bulk agent in terms of Iraq's biological weapons program. What bulk agent? Where did they make it? Bulk agent has a three year lifetime in terms of storage in ideal conditions. The last time Iraq was known to have produced bulk agent was in 1990. That stuff, even if they held onto it, is no longer viable. So to have bulk agent today, Iraq would have had to reconstitute a manufacturing base in biological weapons. Where is it?

This report is absurd. It has zero factual basis. It's all rhetoric. It's all speculative and, frankly speaking, it's meaningless without, you know, with the sad exception that hawks in the Bush administration are going to point to this as justification for war.

We need a heck of a lot more than this if we're going to talk about sending our forces off to fight in a war in Iraq.

Scott Ritter was bashed by the media, who painted him as a traitor to the United States for failing to accept the White House's justifications. It's interesting how the media, often accused of being quite liberal, went out of their way to discredit Ritter and show loyalty to the White House in late 2002, yet reported of just which mouths had engulfed Clinton's penis could hardly be avoided during Monicagate.

The real story here isn't that the White House lied -- if you pay attention, White House officials "flip-flop" so much over the supposed motivations for war that even their caricature of Kerry looks rock solid. The real story here is that the media fell for the Iraq justification (or lack thereof) hook, line, and sinker, while doing the dirty work of discrediting Scott Ritter and ignoring or discrediting any other voices asking for more investigation for military action against Iraq.

You want links? Try these:

Documentation of "flip-flops" by the "liberal" media -- reporting the truth (that UN inspectors voluntarily left in December 1998), then

Re:LIAR

[james_in_denver]

I beg to disagree, Exhibit "A" was the forged documents purporting that Iraq was attempting to purchase uranium from Niger. It took the U.N. Atomic Energy Agency all of TWO HOURS to prove those documents were forgeries. The sophisticated tool that they used?????? Google Seems a signatory on that forged document HAD BEEN DEAD for a number of years. Didn't stop Bush & Co, (or even, sadly, Colin Powell) from ranting and raving about "mushroom clouds"....

Re:Explaining that 45%

[FredFnord]

How about Reasoned Compromise: "May not agree with his every last item of policy, but in comparing the two likely candidates, he is at least closer to the preferred side of issues involving government spending, taxation, business incentives, and military functions."

Um... yeah. Except that, let's see, where the heck did I see that article? Ah, here:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/28/comedy.po litics/
http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/20 04_03_late-night-knowledge-2_9-21_pr.pdf

Of a simple six-question quiz on stances that the candidates hold on major issues, the average person got less than three questions right.
'Who wants to privatize Social Security?'
'Which one doesn't like assault weapons?'
'What is the cutoff income for Kerry's tax increases?' (50k, 100k, 200k, or 500k)
'Who is a former prosecutor?'
'Who favors making the recent tax cuts permanent?'
'Who wants to make it easier for labor unions to organize?'

People who didn't watch any 'late-night comedy show' scored 2.6 out of 6 right. 2.6. Now, even being charitable and assuming that people can't remember numbers (200k, hint hint) and that people don't remember that before becoming President, GWB's only political experience AT ALL was as Governor of Texas, that's still totally utterly pathetic. Do you realize that it means that MORE THAN HALF of those surveyed scored between 0 and 2 out of 6? And that only one of the questions had more than two possible choices?

If you answer that quiz randomly, you get 2.75 right, on average. Let me say that again. If you don't speak English, and just randomly pick an answer for each question, you get a 2.75.

People who watched Jay Leno got 2.95, David Letterman viewers got 2.91, and viewers of The Daily Show, astoundingly enough, got 3.59. Frequent (more than 3 days a week) network news viewers got 40% right, frequent cable news viewers got 48% (they didn't differentiate out Fox viewers, which might have told a different story), and newspaper readers got 46%. Less than half! The only group of people who averaged more than half were viewers of The Daily Show, who were what, 14% more informed than newspaper readers? (Wow, not to digress or anything, but that's kind of neat.)

Anyone who was paying any attention at all got six, and could have done so while drunk and standing on his or her head. The amount of illegal substances that would have been required to make me score 2 would have incapacitated a small midwestern town.

The American public doesn't even know what the two candidates stand for, and you think they're seriously giving weighted averages of all of the different stances and coming up with a decision?

The extent of your optimism awes me.

-fred

Re:Whaaaa?

[Some Bitch]

Is it, in fact, enough safer that we can feel justified in basically ticking off the entire rest of the world aside from England

Don't think we're not pissed off, we are. We just don't blame you, we blame Blair for being such a slimy bastard and ignoring the largest protest ever held in the UK. Oh, and your media for skewing things to the point where a large part of the US has gone from opposing the war to supporting it (insert Goebels quote about patriotism here).

Re:Whaaaa?

[Spyffe]

No. George Bush claimed in his State of the Union address of the 28th, that Saddam was trying to buy tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.

These tubes were made of the wrong kind of aluminum for uranium enrichment. They were too long and too narrow to be suitable. This was in the IAEA report the Bush administration, and the entire UN Security Council, had seen. It was not speculation, it was based on real tubes seized in Jordan. The administration, with Bush as its mouthpiece, lied.

In his speech to the Security Council which underscored the need for war, Colin Powell told the Council that the tolerances for the tubes were better than for any rocket even the US uses. He had, actually, been informed that the tubes were manufactured to comparable tolerances as US rocket tubes. The administration, with Colin Powell as its mouthpiece, lied.

Seems like much ado about nothing, right? But this is the cornerstone of the Administration's belief that Saddam was trying to acquire nuclear weapons. These tubes were the only hard evidence they had going for them.

They weren't just willfully gullible in taking biased reports from a no-name in the CIA which contradicted evidence from DoE experts (a crime of which Kerry and Edwards are also guilty), but they willfully lied. This is now clear.

Re:Israel

[wass]

Well, newsflash- if the right to vote is contingent on religion, you're not a democracy.

Newsflash to you - Arabs can vote in Israel. There are even several Arab officials elected to the Knesset (ie, the Israeli parliament).