The whitehouse's evidence against Iraq It looks like the most specific piece of evidence the Bush administration has laid out so far, hurts Bush's credibility and helps Saddam's. This little tidbit from the article seems bad. If we want to drum up support for a war against Iraq, honesty and thouroughness in investigating the evidence against the Iraqis would be helpful. If it looks like we are lying and manipulating the evidence, then it will be really hard to gain allies, or even support here in the U.S. The odd thing is that this aluminum stuff fits right into the Iraqi story, and actually makes them look more credible. I don't believe this situation is being handled all that well by our whitehouse. http://www.msnbc.com/news/863567.asp#BODY BUSH CITED the aluminum tubes in his speech before the U.N. General Assembly and in documents presented to U.N. leaders. Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice both repeated the claim, with Rice describing the tubes as “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.” It was by far the most prominent, detailed assertion by the White House of recent Iraqi efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. But according to government officials and weapons experts, the claim now appears to be seriously in doubt. After weeks of investigation, U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq are increasingly confident that the aluminum tubes were never meant for enriching uranium, according to officials familiar with the inspection process. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N.-chartered nuclear watchdog, reported in a Jan. 8 preliminary assessment that the tubes were “not directly suitable” for uranium enrichment but were “consistent” with making ordinary artillery rockets — a finding that meshed with Iraq’s official explanation for the tubes. New evidence supporting that conclusion has been gathered in recent weeks and will be presented to the U.N. Security Council in a report due to be released on Monday, the officials said. CLUES FROM THE START Moreover, there were clues from the beginning that should have raised doubts about claims that the tubes were part of a secret Iraqi nuclear weapons program, according to U.S. and international experts on uranium enrichment. The quantity and specifications of the tubes — narrow, silver cylinders measuring 81 millimeters in diameter and about a meter in length-made them ill-suited to enrich uranium without extensive modification, the experts said. But they are a perfect fit for a well-documented 81mm conventional rocket program in place for two decades. Iraq imported the same aluminum tubes for rockets in the 1980s. The new tubes it tried to purchase actually bear an inscription that includes the word “rocket,” according to one official who examined them. “It may be technically possible that the tubes could be used to enrich uranium,” said one expert familiar with the investigation of Iraq’s attempted acquisition. “But you’d have to believe that Iraq deliberately ordered the wrong stock and intended to spend a great deal of time and money reworking each piece.”
