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Rice Aware of Intelligence Debate on Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Efforts Before Making Claims
Prior to claiming in 2002 that Iraq’s efforts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes were an indication of a relaunched nuclear weapons program, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice knew that there was a dispute within the intelligence community as to the intended purposes of the tubes, the New York Times reported Sunday (see GSN, Sept. 28). A year earlier, though, Rice’s staff had been told that there was disagreement on the issue, according to four CIA officials and two senior administration officials. While the White House supported a theory pushed by a CIA analyst that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment centrifuges, Energy Department experts said they were more likely intended for use in conventional artillery rockets, the Times reported. While she knew of the debate on the tubes prior to her CNN appearance, Rice only learned of the rocket theory afterward, the administration officials told the Times. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney also publicly referred to the tubes in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq as evidence of former President Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons efforts, the Times reported. According to the Times, the CIA prepared 15 reports from April 2001 to September 2002 on the issue of tubes, many of which were sent to high-level officials. Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the unreleased reports have said, though, that none of them contained information on the Energy Department’s dissent on the purpose of the tubes. “They never lay out the other case,” a congressional official said. CIA and Bush administration officials said, though, that dissenting views were often discussed during meetings and telephone calls. While some of the reports “weren’t as well caveated as, in retrospect, they should have been,” a senior official said, “there was certainly nothing that was hidden” (Barstow, Broad and Gerth, New York Times, Oct. 3). During interviews yesterday, Rice said that the “intelligence community as a whole” had supported the theory that the tubes were intended for nuclear weapons purposes. An inquiry conducted by the Senate intelligence committee found, though, that while the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency supported that belief, the State Department’s intelligence service backed the Energy Department in its assessment that the tubes were for use in conventional rockets, according to the New York Times. Rice also said yesterday that there was still disagreement as to the real purpose of the tubes. “People are still debating this,” she said. CIA officials have said that the purpose of the tubes is still an open question, according to the Times. The Iraq Survey Group, the unit conducting the search for evidence of prewar Iraq’s WMD efforts, has told both the CIA and Congress, however, that no evidence has been found that the tubes had been intended for a nuclear weapons program, the Times reported. Regardless of the debate over the tubes, Rice said that invading Iraq was still justified. “I stand by the decision to go to war against Saddam Hussein and remove this threat to American security,” she said (Jeff Gerth, New York Times, Oct. 4). Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (Mass.) said yesterday, though, that Sunday’s New York Times report suggested that the Bush administration had not been truthful in its prewar assessments of Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts, according to Agence France-Presse. “There are very serious questions about whether the administration was open and honest in making the case for war in Iraq," Kerry said. “These are questions that the president must face. These are question that the president has to answer fully to the American people and the troops” (Agence France-Presse/Yahoo!News, Oct. 3).
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