Centrifuges of mass destruction

CNN reports a significant WMD program find in Iraq:

The CIA has in its hands the critical parts of a key piece of Iraqi nuclear technology—parts needed to develop a bomb program—that were dug up in a back yard in Baghdad, CNN has learned.

The parts, with accompanying plans, were unearthed by Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi who had hidden them under a rose bush in his garden 12 years ago under orders from Qusay Hussein and Saddam Hussein’s then son-in-law, Hussein Kamel.

The crowing from administration apologists has already begun, of course. Never mind the numerous false alarms in the past, from the pesticide barrels to the hydrogen factories. Let’s assume this one is for real: it seems legitimate. We really have found a 12 year old gas centrifuge in a barrel buried in a scientist’s back yard. What does that prove? Two things:

1. Iraq had a nuclear program in 1991.
2. Iraq did not have a nuclear program in 2003.

In the words of former weapons inspector David Albright:

“In a sense, the program was in hibernation. He was the key to the restart of this centrifuge program, and he never got the order. So in that sense it doesn’t show at all that Iraq had a nuclear program. And Obeidi told me that he never worked on a nuclear program after 1991.”

Saddam didn’t restart his nuclear program in 1998, after the inspectors were gone. What evidence is there that he would have ever restarted it? In the absence of an active program, a centrifuge in a barrel is a threat to no one, and can’t be called a justification for pre-emptive war.

Except, of course, that it will be. Instapundit has the war apologist spin going. Fox news has doctored the story to read thus:

Obeidi also said he was told the materials should remain buried in the backyard of his Baghdad home until sanctions against Iraq ended, when they would be dug up and used to reconstitute a program to enrich uranium to make a nuclear weapon.

(my emphasis, on this unsourced, non-quoted piece of unsupported “fact”) and so the Mighty Wurlitzer begins its hypnotic serenade. The inflammatory headlines will enter the public consciousness. The clear indication that there was no active nuclear program in Iraq this year, last year, or any year after 1991, will not. Those who have raised legitimate questions about the Bush administration’s shameful conduct leading up the war will be shouted down with chants of “CENTRIFUGE! CENTRIFUGE!”—even though, centrifuge or no, Bush still lied about the Niger-Uranium connection in the State of the Union speech; even though he lied about Iraq’s fearsome unmanned aerial vehicle arsenal; even though Rumsfeld said flat-out that he knew where the WsMD were deployed; even though Condi Rice lied about the aluminum tubes; even though Cheney lied on Meet the Press about this very subject, claiming that Saddam “has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons”.

The WsMD scandal-in-the-making is about to dry up and blow away like dead leaves. Just you wait and see.

UPDATE: In fairness, the AP also has the “until the end of sanctions” construction in its story, so my heated claim of Fox doctoring would be, well, wrong. The AP version is here.

Filed under: politics/war