Circle of life

Barton Gellman continues his evisceration of the Bush administration’s credibility on the subject of pre- and post-war WMD claims in tomorrow’s Washington Post.

According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration’s prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.

Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq’s nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

Pretty damning. But at least these revelations are revelations of an honest misjudgement, right? I mean, they went in searching hard for dangerous, proliferable nuclear technology like those aluminum tubes we heard so much about—they just never found any.

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[.]

On the ground in Iraq, one investigator said, the nuclear investigation began as and remained “the least significant of the missions.”

Ok, maybe not. So the clear implication of that would be:

“They’re not acting as if they take their own analysis seriously,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “If they were so worried about these tubes, that would be the kind of sensitive equipment you’d think the administration would want to seize, to prevent it from going somewhere else—Iran, Syria, Egypt.”

And what about those terrible, dangerous, incrimintating aluminum tubes? The ones that were only suitable for use in nuclear centrifugery? The ones we never bothered even to collect? What ever happend to them?

Scavengers most likely have “sold them as drain pipe.”

I see. So they are now as full of shit as Bush himself. In the end as it was in the beginning. Cute.

Filed under: politics/war