Dick Did Not

A very detailed NYTimes article describes how senior Bush Administration officials -- Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and George W. Bush himself -- pushed the aluminum tubes as definitive proof that nuclear centerfuges, and so a nuclear program "related activities", were active in Iraq prior to our invasion.

In order to do so, they ignored the evaluation of those tubes by senior American nuclear physicists, which said "Can't be for a nuclear program -- mebbe small rockets."

An exhaustive review of the evidence, known at the time showed the "centerfuge tubes" were too narrow, too thick, too shiny and too long to be centerfuge tubes. But first, a junior CIA analyst's ("Joe") assessment of the tubes went to the White House on April 10 2001, saying they have "little use other than for a uranium enrichment program" -- a quote directly used later (Sept 8 2002) by Condi Rice on a CNN program, where she famously said the tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs..... We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The DOE, however, enlisted senior American nuclear physicists, who immediately recognized the tubes as unsuited to uranium enrichment, and published this assessment on May 9 2001 in the Daily Intelligence Highlight -- a month after "Joe's" assesment -- as well as pointing out the new tubes were exactly the same materials and dimensions as tubes used by Iraq for rockets (81mm diameter, walls 3.3mm thick, 900 mm long).

However, it was Dick Cheney who made the announcement -- on "Meet the Press" in Sept 2002 -- that, based on the aluminum tubes, he knew "for sure" and "in fact" and "with absolute certainty" that Hussein was buying equipment for a nuclear weapon -- a level of certitude absent even from the most optimistic CIA assessments. "He has reconstituted his nuclear program", Cheney said.

Cheney started the ball rolling. It rolled further when, on Sept 11 2002, the admin asked the CIA to vet a speech, which included the line: "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." Such vettings are routine, and are done so the CIA can keep the administration from making factual misstatments. In this case, the CIA failed to raise any concern about the statment, and it was included President Bush's speech the next day in front of the UN General Assembly.

Read the article. One can only conclude from its contents that the administration, led by Dick Cheney, was willfully blind to the obvious --- and not even in retrospect obvious, but at the time obvious -- evidence the tubes were not for a nuclear program.

Can't you hear Lynn now? "And when others saw that the tubes were the exact same dimensions of rocket tubes, and professional senior American scientists concluded they were unsuited to a nuclear weapons program, Dick did not."