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Editorial: Saddam and the bomb / More evidence he wasn't trying for one


Published August 12, 2003

Evidence continues to mount that on the matter of Iraq's nuclear weapons
program, the Bush administration repeatedly made claims it knew or had reason to
know were untrue. The latest evidence comes in a powerful Washington Post report
by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus. It should stimulate the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence to dig very deep indeed in its investigation of the
intelligence used to justify a preemptive war against Iraq.

The Gellman-Pincus article (which can be read in its entirety at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A395002003Aug9.html) reports "a
pattern in which President Bush, Vice President 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."

Cheney was the hawk's hawk on Iraq. "We now know," he said on Aug. 26, 2002,
"that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other
sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including
Saddam's own son-in-law."

But the son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, died in 1996 and could not have been a source
for the United States learning anything in 2002. Moreover, what Kamel told U.N.
arms inspectors in 1995, after he defected to Jordan, was that, "Iraq's
enrichment programs had not resumed after halting at the start of the Gulf War
in 1991."

Gellman and Pincus relate that Iraq did have a number of things necessary to
secretly produce nuclear weapons: highly educated scientists and engineers, an
established desire to go nuclear, a propensity for covert actions and designs
for critical elements of the nuclear program. What it didn't have was enriched
uranium or the centrifuges necessary to make it.

The United States insisted that aluminum tubes Iraq tried to purchase abroad
were for those centrifuges. Almost every scientist outside government -- and
most inside -- believed they were, as Iraq said, for an Iraqi version of Italy's
Medusa 81 rocket. Gellman and Pincus report, "Not only the Medusa's alloy, but
also its dimensions, to the fraction of a millimeter, matched the disputed
aluminum tubes."

When Secretary of State Colin Powell made his famous appearance before the U.N.
Security Council in February, he insisted that the tubes were meant for use in
centrifuges. That case was buttressed, he said, by the latest batch of tubes,
which had "an anodized coating on extremely smooth inner and outer surfaces."

Gellman and Pincus report that an anodized coating actually was an argument for
rocket use. It would have protected rockets "from the sort of corrosion that
ruined Iraq's previous rocket supply" -- and, moreover, would have needed to be
removed for the Iraqis to use the tubes in a centrifuge.

In fact, even then the tubes were next to useless for enriching uranium: They
were too narrow, too thick and too long. Houston G. Woods III, retired founder
of the centrifuge physics department at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and "among
the most eminent living experts," told Gellman and Pincus that "it would have
been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges. It stretches the
imagination to come up with a way. I do not know any real centrifuge experts
that feel differently. . . . I don't see how you do it."

On every piece of evidence in the U.S. indictment of Iraq, the story is the
same: With a weak case on the most powerful argument for war -- preventing
Saddam Hussein from going nuclear -- the Bush administration exaggerated and
twisted information, and frequently just made stuff up.

In the antiwar camp, one of the most popular sayings is, "Bush lied, soldiers
died." That's strong stuff, but there's more than a suggestion that it's true.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee returns from its August recess and delves
into these questions, it should strive hard to expose and make public the
complete truth. The president's party controls the Senate and will likely try to
limit the investigation. But senators have a higher calling than to party; it's
to the American people whose sons and daughters are paying the price for the
invasion of Iraq.


http://www.startribune.com/stories/561/4036475.html