Maine Owl

How the War Party softened the public for the taking of Iraq

Perhaps the most incredible war propaganda piece of all time was published by the liberal New York Times on September 8, 2002:

U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts
By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JUDITH MILLER
Published: Sunday, September 8, 2002

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.

In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.

The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.

Then they finally could tell us, six months after it was too late, the Al tubes were better suited for drain pipe:

Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program
By Barton Gellman | Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A01

In their march to Baghdad on April 8, U.S. Marines charged past a row of eucalyptus trees that lined the boneyard of Iraq's thwarted nuclear dream. Sixty acres of warehouses behind the tree line, held under United Nations seal at Ash Shaykhili, stored machine tools, consoles and instruments from the nuclear weapons program cut short by the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Thirty miles to the north and west, Army troops were rolling through the precincts of the Nasr munitions plant. Inside, stacked in oblong wooden crates, were thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes. ...

Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be "innocuous," according to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, who commands the Joint Captured Enemy Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay. That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead. ...

Participants in the Pentagon-directed special weapons teams, interviewed repeatedly since late last spring, noted that Kay's operation has taken no steps to collect the estimated 20,000 tubes in Iraq's inventory -- some badly corroded, but others of higher quality than the ones the U.S. government intercepted in Jordan three years ago and described as dangerous technology.

"If you told me they had access to these tubes and have chosen not to seize and destroy them, it undermines the judgment that these tubes are usable for, if not intended for, centrifuge development," said Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, who retains his classified clearances and still consults with government analysts on Iraq.

Meekin said he no longer knows the whereabouts of the tubes once stacked at Nasr. "They weren't our highest priority," he said. "The thing's innocuous." Unguarded, the tubes "could be in arms plants, scattered around, being grabbed by looters, perhaps in scrap metal yards."

Scavengers, he said, most likely have "sold them as drain pipe."

Today, whenever a member of the War Party is confronted about the falsity of 2002-3 Iraq weapons claims, the response without hesitation always is to roll out the "everybody believed" canard. To review, this is the War Party enumeration of all the impressive names and entities supposedly who "believed" in the weapons at the time. Typical views in this vein were expressed by conservative political scientist John McAdams from Marquette University on Wisconsin Public Radio in 2005 (see the link above):

Let's make a list of those who believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction: Russian intelligence, French intelligence, British intelligence, Tony Blair, the CIA, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, John Kerry.

The problem here is that when we look into the actual news of the time, "everybody" turns out to be far less than everybody. Even the Times itself, according to a comprehensive piece from ISIS on intelligence concerning the aluminum tubes in 2002, began gingerly to back off the claims by reporting on dissent from War Party views as soon as September 13, 2002:

Soon afterward, voices of dissent started to be heard. A September 13, 2002 New York Times article stated that although the CIA position appears to be the dominant view, some experts in the Department of Energy and the State Department questioned this conclusion. According to the New York Times report, the administration has shown great sensitivity about suggestions that intelligence experts differ over Iraq's intentions, because Iraq's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) is the centerpiece of the argument for planning a military attack to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime.

An intelligence official told the media that the statement in the White Paper quoted above was toned down. The CIA asked the White House to do so to reflect dissenting opinions and also to give the United States a "little wiggle room." Reflecting this uncertainty, another intelligence official added that the aluminum tubing was "not a smoking gun."

In fact, the intelligence community is deeply divided about the purpose of the tubing, with a significant number of experts knowledgeable about gas centrifuges dissenting from the CIA view. It appears that the New York Times stories represented only one side of this debate.

For more, listen to THIS report from Democracy Now! (September 9, 2002) that places into context dissent from War Party views that clearly came from many governments and the international nuclear agency (IAEA), at the time. Or, read the statements of retired U.S. State Department analyst Greg Thielmann, who has explained how there indeed was much dissent within the U.S. government itself, at the time.

H/T Glenn Greenwald for link to the original Times story.