ER...great post. There seems to an aggresive attempt by the administration to blame the CIA for all the mishaps leading upto the war (did you see the Rummy Interview by Blitzer?). If they had a choice, they would blame the CIA for post-war screw-ups as well. Based on your analysis, how much of this mess can be credibly attributed to the CIA? Is Tenet being made the fall guy?
Posted by Bad Ass at November 22, 2005 08:42 AMBad Ass,
Tenet was complicit in this whole affair. Perhaps a little less so than Bush, Cheney and Rice. But he was very much part of it. He allowed the White House to completely compromise the integrity of the CIA and to make the CIA, as an organization, the "fall guy". It is no surprise then that he got the "Presidential Medal of Freedom".
The issue here is not CIA v. White House or Tenet v. White House. It is the real analysts at CIA, DOE et al. vs. those in the IC executing the White House's agenda.
Posted by eriposte at November 22, 2005 08:55 AMeR, a very useful rundown. I also think your response to BA's question framed this important issue very precisely.
I have a bunch of more or less random thoughts that occurred to me while reading this post. My first point is rather long (because of direct quotations included) so I'll focus on that one here and collect the rest of my points in a second, follow-up comment. Apologies for the length of the comments.
Your account of the British attitude towards the aluminum tubes claims might also be supplemented by the very brief mention of the subject in the Hutton Report. Unfortunately, the timing is about a week later than your cutoff date of Sept. 12, but it's still probably relevant. To give a sense of the context, the sequence of events can be summarised as follows.
On September 16, the British release their second draft of the first Iraq dossier, which mentions aluminum in two places:
(a) the Executive Summary makes a fleeting, obscure reference:
"[Iraq] is covertly trying to acquire technology and materials which could be used in the production of nuclear weapons, including specialised aluminium controlled because of its potential use in enriching uranium."
(b) more specifically, in the main body, Chap. 3, p. 25:
"Of particular concern are the repeated attempts by Iraq covertly to acquire a very large quantity (60,000 pieces) of specialised aluminium tubes. The specialised aluminium in question is subject to international export controls because of its potential application in the construction of gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium."
On Sept. 17, Alastair Campbell sent comments on the draft to John Scarlett (the JIC's version of the complicitous Tenet, who was later promoted for his role). In it he asked:
"Could we use the 60,000 figure in the executive summary, re aluminium."
On Sept. 18, Scarlett, ever ready to oblige, wrote back:
"we have introduced the reference to 60,00 [sic] aluminium tubes into the executive summary."
On Sept. 19, however, a third draft of the dossier was issued and distributed, with a memo from Scarlett attached. Among other things that memo said:
"I should draw your attention to some changes to the Executive Summary, reflecting comments from the Foreign Office.... In particular you should note that we have toned down the reference to aluminium tubes in paragraph 22 on page 28, and removed it from the Executive Summary. This reflects some very recent exchanges on intelligence channels."
There are many comments that could be made on this. At the very least it's worth pointing out:
(a) One presumes that the "exchanges" were with foreign, not British, intelligence. This entails that dissenting (and apparently pretty authoritative) intelligence -- perhaps from multiple venues -- not only existed but was being shared with the British and, one assumes, others. One wonders with whom (plural?) the "exchanges" (plural) were. (IAEA? Foreign agencies or intelligence services? -- clearly, as you point out, Australia's ONA was aware that "US agencies differ[ed]" on the subject.) Almost certainly some of the "exchanges" occurred prior to Sept. 12.
(b) The British were both able to engage in and -- ultimately, and however reluctantly -- willing to heed "exchanges on intelligence channels" that cast doubt on the reliability of the aluminum claims. Contrast, if you will, WINPAC and the White House -- who, to emphasise a crucial point I've raised before, were actors here.
Posted by KM at November 22, 2005 10:23 PMHmmm ... my second point was longer than I'd thought. It gets its own comment, too.
A question about formatting, but an important one, I think. In citing paragraph 536 of the Butler Report, you put most of the paragraph in boldface. But you don't emphasise what I think is really the most significant sentence by far:
"It was clear from an early date that, on the basis of the specifications of the tubes Iraq was seeking to acquire, they would have required substantial re-engineering to make them suitable for gas centrifuge use, including reducing them in length, and machining metal off the inside and outside. This was paradoxical, since Iraq had laid down very fine tolerances for the tubes."
A quite fundamental problem with the centrifuge case, one which all of its advocates ignored, fraudulently misrepresented, or tried to minimise, was the fact that whereas the tubes sought in 2000-2 would have had to be rather seriously modified on a number of important dimensions in order to make them even candidates for use in a gas centrifuge, they were almost exactly identical (same materials, same dimensions) to tubes which Iraq was known to have purchased and to have used to build its Nasser 81-mm. rockets in 1987-9. There were many, many differences between the tubes Iraq sought and those required for Zippe centrifuges. By contrast, there were only two differences between the 2000-2 tubes and the 1987-9 tubes: (1) the anodisation of the interior of the 2000-2 tubes and (2) the high tolerances to be applied to their specs.
It is therefore no coincidence that these are really the only two points raised by Powell in his infamous UN presentation when he sought to counter possible objections to the tubes case.
The anodisation issue is quickly taken care of, and is at any rate in itself a knock against the centrifuge case, as anodisation is not only totally unnecessary for centrifuge tubing but in fact potentially deleterious to its smooth operation. Once the previous Iraqi purchase of virtually identical tubes in the 1980s was widely known, the tolerances question was really the only card the Admin/CIA had.
But here's the devastating point put in so concise and (perhaps predictably) so understated a fashion by the Butler Report: the aluminum tubes sought by Iraq in 2000-2 would have had to be substantially machined in order to make them suitable for gas centrifuge use (e.g. in order to reduce the tubes' thickness to about a third of its original value). But "This was paradoxical, since Iraq had laid down very fine tolerances for the tubes." If the tubes had to be machined inside and out, the tolerances of the original construction would have been meaningless, as then the only tolerances applying to the finished tubes would be those governing the new machining.
So not only did it make no sense that the Iraqis would specify very high tolerances on the tubes they sought, when they would just have to machine those tolerances away anyway; as a matter of brute fact the machining that would be necessary to convert the tubes to centrifuge use made any original tolerances to which the tubes were first constructed completely irrelevant. It really didn't matter what tolerances the Iraqis had specified. If the Iraqis had been after the tubes for nuclear purposes, the tolerances they ordered for the tubes' initial construction would have been utterly meaningless and irrelevant to the final product and its end use.
This fact alone completely rubbishes the entire argument about tolerances -- and hence, in effect, the whole centrifuge case. (There are, nevertheless, many other devastating points that apply to the tolerances argument.)
Posted by KM at November 22, 2005 11:36 PMThe other random points:
As Albright points out in a passage you cited, "Joe" messed up the rotor mass calculation and so was forced to reduce the wall thickness of the tubes in his simulated centrifuge design, from 3.3 mm. (the thickness of the Iraqi tubes) to 1.0 mm. Of course, he (or someone in the CIA) might have simply contacted Gernot Zippe, the designer of the Zippe centrifuge, himself. The DOE managed to do it, after all. If he had, he would have found out right away, from the authority par excellence, that "the wall thickness of [Zippe's] centrifuge designs were not more than 1 mm" (SSCI, 123). But of course neither the CIA nor the White House was ever interested in the judgements of actual authorities on that subject. It's therefore not surprising that "Critics started to believe that the CIA analysts had designed a centrifuge around the tubes rather than determined the use of the tubes from their characteristics". (Albright, 12)
On that note, it's worth noting that Houston Wood III, whose rejection of the centrifuge argument is cited by the Australian report, is considered by many to be the most eminent living expert on centrifuge physics.
Finally, Cheney's Sept. 8 statement was deceptive for another reason. He didn't make any mention of what equipment, needed to enrich uranium, Saddam wasn't trying to procure. As Albright points out, the use of obsolete and inefficient aluminum tubes -- rather than the modern carbon-fibre centrifuge rotors the Iraqis had already perfected by the end of the 1980s -- would have meant that Iraq would need five times as many centrifuges to achieve the same amount of weapons-grade uranium. If they built 25 000 centrifuges, for example, they'd also need 25 000 upper bearings, 25 000 lower bearings, 25 000 outer casings and 50 000 end caps, plus further materials and specialised oils, many of them illegal for Iraq to import. And of course no intelligence service had reported any sign whatsoever of any such purchases, let alone in such quantities.
Thought-provoking post, eR. Am looking forward to the next installments.
Posted by KM at November 23, 2005 12:23 AMThere's also useful stuff in Duties of Australian personnel in Iraq by the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee.
Posted by Alan at November 23, 2005 02:43 AMKM, very good points, especially on the issue of tolerances. I purposely did not get into too much detail on the technical aspects of the tubes in this post because in all my posts so far I am making my case simply using the intel reports' acknowledgement of alternative uses for the tubes - regardless of the technical implausibility of the use of those tubes for centrifuges.
But thanks for the comments - I will probably use them in a subsequent post, once I get to the technical aspects.
Posted by eriposte at November 23, 2005 05:53 AMSilly me -- forgot to mention in the tolerances post that the very same machining required to make the tubes candidates for centrifuge use would also of course destroy any interior-surface anodisation which had originally been applied. So there goes the anodisation argument too.
Just stunning that these guys got away with this nonsense.
Posted by KM at November 25, 2005 12:52 PM