Busted

For months, the Bush administration has been pushing the idea that Iraq is aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapons program. In order to justify going to war against Iraq, this is a critical argument to be able to make. First, in the triumvirate of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons are clearly the most dangerous and the most feared. Second, evidence of a home-grown nuclear weapons program takes attention away from the fact that the US actively aided Iraq in the 1980s in developing chemical and biological weapons, and then looked the other way when Iraq actually used chemical weapons against the Kurds.

Bush routinely presents two key pieces of evidence to support his claim of Iraqi nuclear ambitions. First, there are the anodized aluminum tubes that are asserted to have been purchased for use in building a centrifuge to enrich uranium. Second, there are documents which purport to show Iraqi efforts to purchase uranium in Africa. Even if no one really believes Iraqi is close to being able to build a nuclear bomb now, this evidence, if true, would certainly support the claim that Iraq is trying very hard to build one, and thus is a long-term threat to regional and global stability.

The problem for Bush, though, is that this evidence isn't real. According to a rather stunning story in today's Washington Post:

A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions.

Documents that purportedly showed Iraqi officials shopping for uranium in Africa two years ago were deemed "not authentic" after careful scrutiny by U.N. and independent experts, Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the U.N. Security Council.

ElBaradei also rejected a key Bush administration claim — made twice by the president in major speeches and repeated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday — that Iraq had tried to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Also, ElBaradei reported finding no evidence of banned weapons or nuclear material in an extensive sweep of Iraq using advanced radiation detectors.

"There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities," ElBaradei said.

The issue, however, is not just that the Bush administration got the facts wrong. The question that needs to be asked is: what did Bush know and when did he know it? The documentation for the Iraq-Africa connection "had been given to the U.N. inspectors by Britain and reviewed extensively by U.S. intelligence." Either our intelligence services are incompetent, or they covered up the fact that the documents were forged. Given what we know about the CIA & Co., I figure it's about a 50-50 chance either way. As for the aluminum tubes:

A number of independent experts on uranium enrichment have sided with IAEA's conclusion that the tubes were at best ill suited for centrifuges. Several have said that the "anodized" features mentioned by Powell are actually a strong argument for use in rockets, not centrifuges, contrary to the administration's statement.

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based research organization that specializes in nuclear issues, reported yesterday that Powell's staff had been briefed about the implications of the anodized coatings before Powell's address to the Security Council last month. "Despite being presented with the falseness of this claim, the administration persists in making misleading arguments about the significance of the tubes," the institute's president, David Albright, wrote in the report.

We've all known for quite a while that President Bush has no special affection for the truth. And now it appears that even Colin Powell, regarded by many as the straightest shooter in the admininstration, can recklessly disregard the facts when it serves a purpose. This is just outrageous.