It's not funny because it's true.
UPDATE: Publius's discussion of this is deeper.
Posted by armand at October 4, 2004 11:07 AM | TrackBack | Posted to PoliticsFor Kerry, complexity is nuance, for Dr. Rice it's lying?
When George Tenet attacks Bush, his integrity and claims are to be listened to without question, but when he insists the aluminum tubes are to be used in a centrifuge and Dr. Rice listens
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20041003_384.html
he should have been ignored. Careful, Armand, you're becoming just as consistent as Kerry.
It strikes me that the people who should be listened to are the scientists, since they are the ones who really know about these machines. They are clear on this matter.
This isn't a matter of complexity or nuance. It's a matter of Team Bush looking the other way, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, when actual facts contradicted what they wanted to do or believe - in other words, the typical behavior of this administration on Iraq.
And yeah, she lied. There's no debate on this now. She says there is one. To me, that's a lie.
Posted by: Armand at October 4, 2004 01:12 PM | PERMALINKmorris -- from the story you cite:
"The intelligence community assessment as a whole was that these (tubes) were likely and certainly suitable for, and likely for, his nuclear weapons program," Rice told ABC's "This Week." She said the director of the CIA at the time, George Tenet, believed that the tubes were for centrifuge parts.
i see nothing in this article supporting what you say george tenet "insisted," only what condi says he insisted, which insofar as it's terribly self-serving (at least if one important person had supported her claim, she would have a passable argument that she'd had a basis to ignore half a dozen others (who, unlike tenet, by nature a generalist, were specialists in the subject matter at hand)) does not strike me as terribly credible. i see nothing in the story suggesting her claim was independently verified; seeing as you're evidently all about verification, i see no reason to credit her claims. when a liar tells you he's telling the truth, you're a fool to believe him.
furthermore, again in the article you cite, there's this:
A New York Times story Sunday quoted four CIA officials and a senior administration official as saying that Rice and her staff had been told in 2001 that Energy Department experts believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets and not nuclear weapons.
Rice said she learned of objections by the Energy Department only after making her 2002 comments.
why would when she learned of these expert assessments that wholly contradict her claims be of any relevance whatsoever, since two years later, she's still obviously rejecting them? it's not just the emperor himself who has no clothes, it's his minions as well, and increasingly you're sounding like one of them.
Posted by: joshua at October 4, 2004 01:18 PM | PERMALINKArmand,
For someone so open to the idea of nuance when Kerry's talking, you nonetheless ignore that politicians don't respond to facts, they respond to opinions, and they have to see those within a context. There are probably hundreds of uses for those tubes, but with the information coming from Tenet, they saw this within the pattern of behavior by Saddam that might lead to him having nukes by the end of the decade, this pattern is confirmed by Edwards' statements posted in the "John Kerry on Bush and Iraq" thread even before the intelligence report they suggest was tainted by Cheney's influence came out. Edwards was on the intelligence committee, he supported intervening to stop Saddam from what Edwards believed were nuclear ambitions. So how much of a stretch is it that these tubes could be used for that purpose, when we have no indication the scientists from the Energy department were made aware of this context. Yes, it's true another senator on the intelligence committee did not think these tubes were for a nuclear weapons program, but if Edwards believed they were having seen the intelligence (unless he was absent that day like Kerry was the year after the WTC bombing), then how can you fault Dr. Rice and President Bush for taking the same position as Edwards? Moreover, the head of Saddam's nuclear program said he could had nukes within three years, confirming exactly what Bush and Edwards feared.
Joshua,
I think we know from Tenet's history that he wouldn't hesitate to come forward against Bush if what Dr. Rice claimed was not something he remembered. You can refer to the comment I made to Armand above about seeing this within a context. Oh, you're throwing me a softball: who to believe, the National Security Advisor or the New York Times? I'm wondering who's the fool if you're taking the word of the New York Times so easily.
Morris,
Go and read the (long) New York Times story. If it is accurate (and there are enough "on the record" quotes about the technical parts to make me believe it is so), then the Energy Department scientists were very aware of the context. The story makes clear that the Energy Department scientists were debating Iraqi attempts to build a weapon's program: it was not a theoretical debate about an unknown state.
I do not think there were "hundreds" of uses for the tubes, but being a part of a centrifuge was clearly not one of the good ones. Yes, the tubes could have been modified to be used in that fashion, but those modifications would have been complex, difficult and expensive:
Likewise, Britain's experts believed the tubes would need "substantial re-engineering" to work in centrifuges, according to Britain's review of its prewar intelligence. Their experts found it "paradoxical" that Iraq would order such finely crafted tubes only to radically rebuild each one for a centrifuge. Yes, it was theoretically possible, but as an Energy Department analyst later told Senate investigators, it was also theoretically possible to "turn your new Yugo into a Cadillac."
Here's my favorite quote:
The Energy Department team concluded it was "unlikely that anyone" could build a centrifuge site capable of producing significant amounts of enriched uranium "based on these tubes." One analyst summed it up this way: the tubes were so poorly suited for centrifuges, he told Senate investigators, that if Iraq truly wanted to use them this way, "we should just give them the tubes."(emphasis added)
The tubes could not have been used, realistically, for a nuclear program. That really cannot be debated. What is worthy of debate are two related questions: (1) why this fact failed to make it's way into the hands of policy-makers so that they could more accurately gauge the threat from Iraq and act accordingly, and (2) if, in fact, this information was given to the decision-makers, why they choose instead to suppress this information when making public statements (TV interviews, speeches) and private statements (briefings to Congress).
In other words, it is possible that the Administration gave misleading information to the Senate Intelligence Committee (and, by extension, to the entire Senate). This would explain Edwards' statements specifically on the tubes, and helps explain the entire Senate vote (if they didn't have the same information as the President, they really couldn't be expected to vote accurately).
I'm not going to make any kind of partisan attack here. This is very, very serious, and really does need to be investigated. If the President withholds information from Congress, isn't that somehow wrong? I'm not saying that's what happened, I'm saying that that is one possible explanation. Either the path from the intelligence services to the national security council collapsed (which should be investigated, so it won't happen again) or the national security council failed to pass on critical information to the right people (which should be investigated so it doesn't happen again).
Something went badly wrong here. Shouldn't we find out what?
Posted by: baltar at October 5, 2004 09:31 AM | PERMALINKbaltar pretty much covered everything i wanted to say, but i will tie it up with this paraphrase from ATC yesterday evening with regard to the administration's pathological attempt to bootstrap their centrifuge claim on the yellowcake claim . . .
"it's like that old saying: 'if we had ham we would have ham sandwiches if we had bread.'"
Posted by: joshua at October 5, 2004 09:37 AM | PERMALINKBaltar,
You leave out some great quotes:
"Iraq had never made more than a dozen centrifuge prototypes. Half failed when rotors broke. Of the rest, one actually worked to enrich uranium, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, who once ran Iraq's centrifuge program, said in an interview last week."
To paraphrase the old show, "They have the technology. They can rebuild it." Personally, I wonder who cares whether the tubes could be used for this purpose. They had tried to build nukes before, they had kicked out the inspectors, how many chances should we give them? Dr. Obeidi says they could have had a nuke within three years, maybe less.
The article makes the point I made above about seeing this within a context:
"Mr. Cheney had grappled with national security threats for three decades, first as President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff, later as secretary of defense for the first President Bush. He was on intimate terms with the intelligence community, 15 spy agencies that frequently feuded over the significance of raw intelligence. He knew well their record of getting it wrong (the Bay of Pigs) and underestimating threats (Mr. Hussein's pre-1991 nuclear program) and failing to connect the dots (Sept. 11)."
Should we have risked underestimating this threat? Should we have acted like we had time on our side, given this intelligence record, like Kerry suggested we do in 1991 when Saddam was 12 months from having a nuclear weapon?
And you ignore the evidence presented that Cheney did NOT influence the intelligence communiety, as so many Bush bashers often suggest:
"There's no question they had a point of view, but there was no attempt to get us to hew to a particular point of view ourselves, or to come to a certain conclusion," the deputy director of analysis at Winpac told the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It was trying to figure out, why do we come to this conclusion, what was the evidence. A lot of questions were asked, probing questions."
The article continues:
"But in interviews, C.I.A. and administration officials disclosed that the dissenting views were repeatedly discussed in meetings and telephone calls.
One senior official at the agency said its "fundamental approach" was to tell policy makers about dissenting views. Another senior official acknowledged that some of their agency's reports "weren't as well caveated as, in retrospect, they should have been." But he added, "There was certainly nothing that was hidden."
So where is the evidence of the coercive environment Cheney created in the intelligence community? To me, this gets him off the hook.
Getting back to the argument here:
But he was, as one staff member on the Senate Intelligence Committee put it, "the ringleader" of a small group of Winpac analysts who were convinced that the tubes were destined for centrifuges. His views carried special force within the agency because he was the only Winpac analyst with experience operating uranium centrifuges. In meetings with other intelligence agencies, he often took the lead in arguing the technical basis for the agency's conclusions.
"Very few people have the technical knowledge to independently arrive at the conclusion he did," said Dr. Kay, the weapons inspector, when asked to explain Joe's influence.
This suggests that, as I stated above, there are no "facts" when dealing with intelligence, only different opinions from experts with different levels of experience.
The article continues:
At that point [August 2002], the tubes debate was in its 16th month. Yet Mr. Tenet, of the C.I.A., the man most responsible for briefing President Bush on intelligence, told the committee that he was unaware until that September of the profound disagreement over critical evidence that Mr. Bush was citing to world leaders as justification for war.
Even now, committee members from both parties express baffled anger at this possibility. How could he not know? "I don't even understand it," Olympia Snowe, a Republican senator from Maine, said in an interview. "I cannot comprehend the failures in judgment or breakdowns in communication."
Mr. Tenet told Senate investigators that he did not expect to learn of dissenting opinions "until the issue gets joined" at the highest levels of the intelligence community.
So, are both Dr. Rice and Tenet lying?
This is interesting, considering a later passage:
At the Democratic convention in Boston this summer, Senator John Kerry pledged that should he be elected president, "I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence." But in October 2002, when the Senate voted on Iraq, Mr. Kerry had not read the National Intelligence Estimate, but instead had relied on a briefing from Mr. Tenet, a spokeswoman said. "According to the C.I.A.'s report, all U.S. intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons," Mr. Kerry said then, explaining his vote. "There is little question that Saddam Hussein wants to develop nuclear weapons."
And it goes on:
Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, served on the Intelligence Committee, which gave him ample opportunity to ask hard questions. But in voting to authorize war, Mr. Edwards expressed no uncertainty about the principal evidence of Mr. Hussein's alleged nuclear program.
"We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons," Mr. Edwards said then.
As to your suggestion the Bush administration misled Congress, the article clearly says:
But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.
If they didn't know, and Tenet didn't know, why do you presume that the President knew? What you may be missing in the way this case is laid out is the context, the suspicion of Saddam by Bush, Kerry, and Edwards because of Saddam's refusal to abide by inspections; add that to the concern over another September 11th, and Bush made the right call.
Morris,
I will be happy to respond to your specific quotes from the NYT article. However, you have missed the central point of my argument. I argued that one of two things went wrong:
1)The intelligence services screwed up. Even though some of them knew (Energy Department, British Intelligence) that the tubes were almost certainly not going to be used for weapons, the summary reports that went up the chain to the decision makers (Rice, Powell, Cheney and Bush) in fact conveyed the opposite facts: that the tubes were for weapon production.
2)The intelligence services did pass on the facts that the tubes were likely not for weapons production, and the national security team (Rice, Powell, Cheney, and Bush) lied to the public about what the actual intelligence on this issue was.
My main point is that one of these two things had to have happened, and we really, really need to figure out which. Both failures are critical, but fixing the problem depends on which failure occured (and might still be occuring).
That being said, there are some points in the NYT story that argue for duplicitous actions by figures in the administration (they lied to us). Is this for certain? No, but it is worrying. The quotes you cite are not necessarily evidence against this.
You cite the quote about Iraq having a dozen prototype centrifuges (only one of which worked), and argue that since they had the knowledge to make enriched uranium, we were justified. You should read up on the process of how you enrich uranium. You need literally thousands of centrifuges operating in series to get weapons-grade uranium out the back end. Iraq had a single prototype. This was not a serious technological threat to us: they did not have the knowledge or technical ability to build a bomb. It's that simple. I'll cite the next paragraph to the one you cite:
The Energy Department team concluded it was "unlikely that anyone" could build a centrifuge site capable of producing significant amounts of enriched uranium "based on these tubes." One analyst summed it up this way: the tubes were so poorly suited for centrifuges, he told Senate investigators, that if Iraq truly wanted to use them this way, "we should just give them the tubes."
You then argue that we had to see Iraq's activity in long-term context: Iraq had been pushing for nukes for years (they already had chem & bio), and we couldn't wait until they had them. We had to honor the threat. My response is simple: in Febuary of 2003, with UN inspectors all over the place finding nothing, and a ring of US troops surrounding Iraq, we certainly could have waited a bit longer. There was no immediate threat at the time, and as we know now, there was no threat at all. If we had waited, even just a few months, we might have gained allies, or the actual intelligence (Saddam had nothing) might have finally filtered up to the decision-makers, allowing the to re-evaluate Saddam's threat and choose a different course of action. There was no immediate threat, and we knew that at the time.
As for Cheney, the article makes clear that while he didn't directly push the CIA and other agencies to falsify reports, he clearly took "worst case" scenarios and disputed information (the Niger uranium fiasco) and discussed it publically. This is lying by omission: what Cheney reported was technically correct, but Cheney omitted telling the public about the fact that he was discussing a worst-case scenario and that some of the information he was presenting was disputed within the intelligence community. By not providing those very important caveats to his (repeated) statements, he allowed the public to form the (erroneous) impression that Hussein was close to getting nukes. That's not ethical, though maybe not illegal.
As for the argument that intelligence is all about interpretation and that there are no "facts", I'll agree only to a limited degree. Certainly, with no solid "smoking gun" kind of evidence to go on, analysts must make educated guesses about what is happening with limited information. But that doesn't mean that "facts" are absent at all times. The CIA had a single official ("Joe") who strongly believed that the tubes showed clear evidence of a nuclear program. The Energy Department had many nuclear scientists to said precisely the opposite. This wasn't a matter of interpretation, it was a matter of the CIA choosing to ignore contrary evidence. In this case, there was plenty of information around that showed that the aluminum tubes were not useful for nuclear weapons, but the CIA ignored it:
But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.
So, you've got a quote that says the CIA did pass on the disputes, and that there was no "coercive environment". I've got one that says just the opposite. If the internal disputes were passed on, why didn't Cheney (et al.) acknowledge publically that we didn't know that Saddam had a weapons program (some guessed he did, some guessed he didn't). If the internal disputes weren't passed on, what can we do to fix the clearly broken CIA and make sure this doesn't happen again. Seriously, Morris, if a story breaks tomorrow that Syria is has a nuclear program, are you really going to believe it, given the clear evidence that something is broken in the intelligence service somewhere? I'm not sure how much I belive about North Korean nukes, given the clear failure to accurately estimate what Iraq did.
As for the Tenet quotes, they frighten the heck out of me. If the Director doesn't know that "facts" that have been publically presented by the administration are, in fact, disputed by credible members of the intelligence community, then there is a very serious, critical breakdown in the system.
To be honest, I would prefer to find out that the administration lied. I don't say this out of partisan anger, but because that is the simplest solution with the simplest fix (vote them out). If they lied, that means the CIA isn't fundamentally broken. If they didn't lie, then the CIA is in very bad shape and in need of major reform (which would need to take place during a time of critical need for good intelligence, qua Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Al Qaeda). I would prefer the simpler solution, but will take either. I just want to know. This is what I argued at the beginning. It is absolutely critical for the US to determine which of the two possibilities explains the failure in Iraq (either they lied or the intelligence system is broken). I would support any investigation that really tries to determine this (Bush has stonewalled and prevented any except the 9/11 commission, which didn't examine this issue). If the CIA is broken, we're flying blind in the mountains in a snowstorm without radar, and getting deeper every day. We need to know what's wrong as soon as possible.
Posted by: baltar at October 6, 2004 11:48 AM | PERMALINKBaltar,
In responding to this thread, I am jumping in against Armand's penchant for saying Dr. Rice lies whenever she opens her mouth. I agree that the intelligence community screwed up, but it's not clear at all that Kerry who authored a bill to cut the intelligence budget by 7% would have done better with this limited intelligence than Bush.
As to your suggestion that the intelligence was passed to the national security team who suppressed it, that's countered by Tenet as I cited above:
At that point [August 2002], the tubes debate was in its 16th month. Yet Mr. Tenet, of the C.I.A., the man most responsible for briefing President Bush on intelligence, told the committee that he was unaware until that September of the profound disagreement over critical evidence that Mr. Bush was citing to world leaders as justification for war.
Even now, committee members from both parties express baffled anger at this possibility. How could he not know? "I don't even understand it," Olympia Snowe, a Republican senator from Maine, said in an interview. "I cannot comprehend the failures in judgment or breakdowns in communication."
Mr. Tenet told Senate investigators that he did not expect to learn of dissenting opinions "until the issue gets joined" at the highest levels of the intelligence community.
If Tenet didn't know, why do you presume Bush knew?
The other rebuttal from the article I cited above is this:
But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.
These points run exactly counter to what you're suggesting, that senior policy makers (Rice, Bush) knew about the debate at the Energy Department.
Baltar,
I think you misread the article. It said that the particular design of centrifuge that Iraq had not used pre-desert storm required 1000's of centrifuges operating in concert, this is the design for which the aluminum tubes would be used. I don't believe (and I can't verify without a trip to the library, because it's pay-per-view now) it said the pre-war design required 1000's. I don't care about the tubes, I'm worried about a uranium enrichment program, as the head of Saddam's nuclear program said they could have completed within three years. One of the best experts on this said these tubes could be used for that purpose; the article suggests as you say this would have been at best a very unwieldy way of pursuing this program, a very difficult way of going about it. But he was a trusted expert in this area, "the only Winpac analyst with experience operating uranium centrifuges," so what's wrong with listening to this expert without competing opinions we're at best uncertain they had availabe?
You suggest we had time on our side to wait, to give the inspectors more time, exactly what Kerry suggested in 1991 when Iraq was to our ignorance 12 months from having a nuke. You make the point that our intelligence is unreliable, but you don't follow that to its natural conclusion that we have to err on the side of caution.
You say Cheney lied by omission by not presenting evidence of competing theories within the intelligence community, evidence we're not even sure he had.
You acknowledge that intelligence is about opinions, but then suggest Cheney should have passed on that we didn't know...whether Saddam had a nuclear program. Don't you see that the fact is, we never know? Even in the of late oft cited example of the Cuban Missile Crisis where the head of state says "the word of the President of the United States is good enough for me," we didn't know those missiles had nuclear tips on them. That was an opinion, one that turned out to be right; Kennedy took the possibility seriously, just as Bush and Cheney took seriously the threat of terrorists with nuclear weapons courtesy of Saddam Hussein given all the information suggesting that conclusion (a conclusion shared at that time by Kerry (via Tenet) and Edwards).
You make an excellent point that I agree with, or at least raise an excellent question, how do we confront nuclear threats when we can't trust our own intelligence? This is tough, but I have to agree with Bush and Cheney's approach, we can't afford to underestimate them, we can't act like we have time when we may not.