Today, [tag]Murray Waas[/tag] has the latest in a fantastic series of National Journal articles about pre-war intelligence, this one focusing specifically on the [tag]aluminum-tubes[/tag] debacle. Apparently, this specific breakdown was uniquely important to the Bush White House in advance of the presidential election because there was ample evidence that the president and his team repeated the claim, despite knowing it was false.
…[Then-Deputy National Security Adviser [tag]Stephen J. Hadley[/tag]] and other administration officials realized that it would be much more difficult to shield Bush from criticism for his statements regarding the aluminum tubes, for several reasons.
For one, Hadley’s review concluded that Bush had been directly and repeatedly apprised of the deep rift within the intelligence community over whether Iraq wanted the high-strength aluminum tubes for a nuclear weapons program or for conventional weapons.
For another, the president and others in the administration had cited the aluminum tubes as the most compelling evidence that Saddam was determined to build a nuclear weapon — even more than the allegations that he was attempting to purchase uranium.And finally, full disclosure of the internal dissent over the importance of the tubes would have almost certainly raised broader questions about the administration’s conduct in the months leading up to war.
“Presidential knowledge was the ball game,” says a former senior government official outside the White House who was personally familiar with the damage-control effort. “The mission was to insulate the president. It was about making it appear that he wasn’t in the know. You could do that on Niger. You couldn’t do that with the tubes.” A Republican political appointee involved in the process, who thought the Bush administration had a constitutional obligation to be more open with Congress, said: “This was about getting past the election.”
The tubes claim was always one of the more absurd arguments from the Bush gang. 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. Everyone at the White House apparently knew it, but they repeated the bogus claim anyway.
What’s more, the military analysts who pushed the line that Bush gang wanted to hear — in other words, the analysts who got the whole thing wrong — were promoted.
The mind reels.