Iraq: Tubegate
By Philippe Boulet-Gercourt
Le Nouvel Observateur Hebdomodaire
Week of 07 October 2004
Look out: major scandal. Those who have been persuaded for a long time that the White House lied
about Iraq will perhaps shrug their shoulders, but it's one thing to suspect, another to prove. The huge
article published in last Sunday's "New York Times", equivalent in length to six pages of the "Nouvel
Observateur", is a turning point in the investigation of the American decision to invade Iraq.
At the center of the argument are the famous tubes Saddam Hussein sought to procure for himself,
some of which were intercepted in June 2001 in Jordan. According to the White House, all the
evidence pointed to these tubes being designed for the production of uranium enrichment centrifuges.
It was these tubes that allowed Dick Cheney to assert that "Saddam has started up his efforts to
acquire nuclear weapons again." It was these tubes that "couldn't really be used except for nuclear
armament programs," according to Condoleezza Rice. It was these tubes that, finally, "most American
experts consider are intended for use as rotors in centrifuges to enrich uranium," Colin Powell claimed
in his sadly famous presentation to the UN.
The "New York Times" has good reason to denounce these lies today: at the time, it took them up
and ran them, an error all the more serious given that the nuclear threat was the most important
argument the Americans advanced to justify the invasion. Now, what does this inquiry demonstrate?
That the tubes, which corresponded exactly to the specifications for Iraqi rockets, were unusable for
centrifuge production; that the certainty of the CIA, which judged the opposite, was essentially
supplied by the expertise of a single minor analyst whose presentation at the International Atomic
Energy Agency was described as "embarrassing and disgusting" by the Vienna experts; that other
very sharp experts from the Energy Department even before the June 2001 interception, had,
repeatedly, proclaimed their doubts loud and clear, going so far as to assert that if the Iraqis really
wanted to use those tubes for centrifuges, "we should give them to them"!
Most seriously: neither Cheney, nor Rice, nor Powell - and consequently, Bush - could be unaware
of this disagreement among the experts, nor of the extremely strong and detailed arguments put
forward by the Energy Department. Consequently, it has been proven today that they all lied, not only
by omission, but by defending a thesis they knew to be contested by the best American experts. It is
difficult to imagine a more harmful scandal one month away from the election. |
