http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2003/31/we_489_01.html

Beyond yellowcake: Dissecting the over-hyped threat of those aluminum
tubes.

By Tim Dickinson

July 28, 2003


Lost in the now radioactive State of the Union scandal is the fact
that the attempted procurement of African uranium wasn't the only
false claim the president uttered that night about Saddam's nuclear
aims.

The 19 words that followed the now-infamous "16 enormously overblown"
ones have proved to be every bit as untrue, and the intelligence
underlying the claim nearly as shoddy.

"Our intelligence sources tell us," President Bush told to the nation
on January 28, "that he [Saddam] has attempted to purchase
high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."

The claim, paired with the alleged uranium buy, painted a damning
picture of Baghdad's atomic ambitions.

The truth is far less frightening.

Saddam did indeed attempt to purchase some highly-refined aluminum
tubes.

But they were not, as alleged by the Bush administration, to be used
in a uranium-enriching centrifuge; rather they were intended to be
used in the production of conventional rockets -- at least according
to the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency, the closest
thing to an impartial authority in this case.

What's more, this was well known at the time Bush delivered his
address.

Indeed, two weeks before the State of the Union, the IAEA said that
the tubes "were not directly suitable" for uranium enrichment.

Months earlier, the Department of Energy had reached the same
conclusion -- as had intelligence experts at the State Department.

So why did the President allege a nuclear use for the tubes?

According to Greg Thielmann, who directed the office of Strategic,
Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department's Bureau
of Intelligence and Research until September 2002, "This
administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude. It's
top-down use of intelligence; 'We know the answers, give us the
intelligence to support those answers.'"

Here, a timeline of how the aluminum tubing allegation became a
lynchpin in the case against Saddam Hussein -- and how that claim
ultimately unraveled.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2003/31/we_489_01.html

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Anyone steppin' up to take responsibility for this whopper?

Harry