The difference between making a mistake and lying is foreknowledge. Given this, it sure looks like Condoleezza Rice and other White House officials were lying before the war about Iraq’s non-existent nuclear weapons program.
In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States now had “irrefutable evidence” — thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.
Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration’s brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein’s revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,” Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
But almost a year before, Ms. Rice’s staff had been told that the government’s foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery rockets.
The White House, though, embraced the disputed theory that the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, an idea first championed in April 2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A. Senior nuclear scientists considered that notion implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the centrifuge theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.
The NYT report is absolutely devastating. They’re totally busted. Rice and others were told about questions surrounding the tubes, but they ignored those questions and presented evidence to the nation as if those doubts didn’t exist. Rice and others hyped, exaggerated, and overstated every possible detail, just to scare people and sell an unnecessary war.
We knew this before, but the NYT article connects a lot of dots. And now the White House’s attempts to spin out of the problem look even more ridiculous.
“As I understand it, people are still debating this,” Rice said on ABC’s “This Week” program. “And I’m sure they will continue to debate it.”
Wrong; the debate is over and Rice lost. But just as importantly, at the time, Rice didn’t acknowledge that there was a debate. For her, there was no doubt, only certainty.
During the CNN interview in 2002, Rice said the tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.” In bolstering the administration’s argument of the threat the nation faced, she said, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
And it’s not like Rice can say now that she was unaware of the conflict over use of the tubes.
Administration officials at the time did not acknowledge that debate, though Rice acknowledged yesterday she was aware of it. “I knew that there was a dispute,” she said. “I actually didn’t really know the nature of the dispute.”
You know how you can tell someone’s in trouble? They start to use double qualifiers — note the “actually didn’t really” choice of words.
But what, exactly, does Rice mean about not understanding the “nature of the dispute”? She’s the NSA, she advises the president, and she scared the public to sell a war. She did so without considering the “nature of the dispute”? What do we pay her for?
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, who has written extensively on the tubes, said that Rice “was grasping at straws” to suggest there is still a debate on the issue. He said there is little dispute within the intelligence community now, with the “overwhelming number of experts and the evidence” concluding the Energy Department analysis was correct.
“I think she is being disingenuous, and just departing from any effort to find the truth,” Albright added.
Sounds like the way in which the Bush White House has operated for nearly four years.