Finally, the New York Times Posts an Informative, Investigative
Article that Proves that the Bush Cartel Presented Highly Disputed
Claims On Iraqi WMDs as Proven Fact.

Kerry is Right; Bush and Cheney Misled America to Justify a Rush
to War

This article was reported by David Barstow, William J. Broad
and Jeff Gerth, and was written by Mr. Barstow.


3 October 2004 By David Barstow

How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence


In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members
of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews
in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his
nuclear weapons program.

Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September,
Vice President ***** Cheney said the United States now had
"irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength
aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined
for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were
seized at the behest of the United States.

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 CIA
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.

One result was a largely one-sided presentation to the
public that did not convey the depth of evidence and
argument against the administration's most tangible proof
of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq.


Today, 18 months after the invasion of Iraq, investigators
there have found no evidence of hidden centrifuges or a
revived nuclear weapons program.

The absence of unconventional weapons in Iraq is now
widely seen as evidence of a profound intelligence failure,
of an intelligence community blinded by "group think,"
false assumptions and unreliable human sources.

Yet the tale of the tubes, pieced together through records
and interviews with senior intelligence officers, nuclear
experts, administration officials and Congressional
investigators, reveals a different failure.

Far from "group think," American nuclear and intelligence
experts argued bitterly over the tubes. A "holy war" is how
one Congressional investigator described it.

But if the opinions of the nuclear experts were seemingly
disregarded at every turn, an overwhelming momentum
gathered behind the CIA assessment. It was a momentum
built on a pattern of haste, secrecy, ambiguity, bureaucratic
maneuver and a persistent failure in the Bush administration
and among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress
to ask hard questions.

Precisely how knowledge of the intelligence dispute
traveled through the upper reaches of the administration
is unclear.

Ms. Rice knew about the debate before her Sept. 2002
CNN appearance, but only learned of the alternative
rocket theory of the tubes soon afterward, according to
two senior administration officials. President Bush
learned of the debate at roughly the same time, a senior
administration official said.

Last week, when asked about the tubes, administration
officials said they relied on repeated assurances by
George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence,
that the tubes were in fact for centrifuges. They also
noted that the intelligence community, including the
Energy Department, largely agreed that Mr. Hussein
had revived his nuclear program.

"These judgments sometimes require members of the
intelligence community to make tough assessments about
competing interpretations of facts," said Sean McCormack,
a spokesman for the president.

Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed. But in a statement,
he said he "made it clear" to the White House "that the
case for a possible nuclear program in Iraq was weaker
than that for chemical and biological weapons."

Regarding the tubes, Mr. Tenet said "alternative views
were shared" with the administration after the intelligence
community drafted a new National Intelligence Estimate
in late September 2002.

The tubes episode is a case study of the intersection
between the politics of pre-emption and the inherent
ambiguity of intelligence.

The tubes represented a scientific puzzle and rival
camps of experts clashed over the tiniest technical
details in secure rooms in Washington, London and
Vienna. The stakes were high, and they knew it.

So did a powerful vice president who saw in 9/11
horrifying confirmation of his long-held belief that the
United States too often naïvely underestimates the cunning
and ruthlessness of its foes.

"We have a tendency - I don't know if it's part of the
American character - to say, 'Well, we'll sit down and
we'll evaluate the evidence, we'll draw a conclusion,' "
Mr. Cheney said as he discussed the tubes in September
2002 on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."

( ... skiped ... )

But at the start of the Bush administration, the intelligence
agencies also agreed that Iraq had not in fact resumed its
nuclear weapons program. Iraq's nuclear infrastructure,
they concluded, had been dismantled by sanctions and
inspections. In short, Mr. Hussein's nuclear ambitions
appeared to have been contained.
More :
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/international/middleeast/03tube.html