I caught the 60 Minutes II report - thanks!
The transcript is available at "The Man who Knew":
cbsnews.com
In addition to Thielmann, the show featured the key scientist at Oak Ridge who analyzed the Aluminum Tubes. His comments follow, but first ...
My comment: In the Jan 28, 2003 SOTU, Bush said: "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." We now know, according to David Kay's inspectors, that the aluminum tubes in question were for use in legal artillery rockets. But this 60 Minutes II report suggests that the administration knew that Bush's statement was false before the SOTU!
From the transcript:
Houston Wood was a consultant who worked on the Oak Ridge analysis of the tubes. He watched Powell’s speech, too.
“I guess I was angry, that’s the best way to describe my emotions. I was angry at that,” says Wood, who is among the world’s authorities on uranium enrichment by centrifuge. He found the tubes couldn’t be what the CIA thought they were. They were too heavy, three times too thick and certain to leak.
"Wasn't going to work. They would have failed," says Wood, who reached that conclusion back in 2001.
Thielmann reported to Secretary Powell’s office that they were confident the tubes were not for a nuclear program. Then, about a year later, when the administration was building a case for war, the tubes were resurrected on the front page of The New York Times.
“I thought when I read that there must be some other tubes that people were talking about. I just was flabbergasted that people were still pushing that those might be centrifuges,” says Wood.
The New York Times reported that senior administration officials insisted the tubes were for an atom-bomb program.
“Science was not pushing this forward. Scientists had made their determination, their evaluation, and now we didn’t know what was happening,” says Wood. |
