Thanks, eriposte, for all your hard work!!!
Posted by Herman at November 29, 2005 01:31 PMI tell you after reading your series on all of this I get more and more pissed off every time I think about how many republican apologists and several media pundits talk(ed) and state(d) how all these reports actually exonerate(d) and prove(d) Buscho was correct in making his pre-war assertions conclusively.
Thanks for another fine fact based analysis debunking those pesky republican myths.
Posted by emal at November 29, 2005 05:00 PMeR, I thought I might draw attention to a couple more points re: what the IAEA's (UNMOVIC) investigation showed and what impact this had on the Admin's tubes case. Both points help to show how completely feeble and ludicrous the centrifuge case really was. Of course, given that the IAEA's investigation was part of the 2002-3 UN inspections process, and reported directly to the Security Council, the Bush Administration (and the CIA, DIA, etc.) was made fully, immediately and ongoingly aware of its findings.
(1) It's probably worth highlighting the following passage in your post, taken from Albright's account (which here uses the language of El Baradei's Mar. 7 Security Council report):
"Iraq provided the inspectors with copies of design documents, procurement records, minutes of committee meetings, and supporting data and samples. Some of this information was obtained during no-notice inspections of Iraqi facilities."
The SSCI (pp. 103-4) also notes that "the IAEA was able to follow the paper trail to document the approval process for the changes made to the tolerances. The IAEA said they were able to match the paper trail of requested changes to Iraq's procurement requests showing that each time a request to change tolerances went to the Ministry, a corresponding procurement request was sent to potential suppliers."
Here is a basic but important point. The IAEA inspectors' investigation established a very large, very diverse and very detailed documentary record of the original and the resurrected Iraqi Nasser rocket programmes, and of the role of the aluminum tubes sought by Iraq in both. So the tubes issue was no longer a matter of armchair speculation and hypothesis (e.g. as with Joe's hypothetical centrifuge designs) -- there was extensive, mutually confirming and credible on-the-ground evidence, some of it obtained during no-notice inspections of Iraqi facilities, that the Iraqis in 1998-2002 had always intended, had specifically (and operationally) planned for, and had engaged in sustained activity to realise, the use of the tubes in the Nasser 81 mm. rocket programme. Anybody claiming that the tubes were really being sought for nuclear purposes would have to deal with the brute fact of this documentation. Of course none of the con artists did -- or even, for that matter, publicly acknowledged its existence.
(2) The IAEA investigation also conclusively established that, prior to (and also during) its efforts to procure aluminum tubes in 2000-2, Iraq had initiated and carried out an extensive programme to salvage the original batch of aluminum tubes retained from the 1987-9 era, and to build rockets out of the salvaged tubes. Albright (p. 23) provides a brief account:
"After the inspectors left Iraq in 1998, Iraq decided to restart its program to make 81-mm rockets indigenously. In about 2000, a high level committee was formed to deal with production problems. Among the most important members were General Hosam Amin and General Kamel, the director and deputy director, respectively, of the National Monitoring Directorate (NMD), which was the liaison organization to the inspectors. After UNSCOM inspections ended, work at the NMD became part-time, and Amin decided to find work for himself and other senior members of the NMD.
One of the first challenges was to try to identify damaged tubes and salvage the good ones. The damaged tubes caused rockets to stick in the launch tubes when fired. In addition, many of the tubes failed hydrostatic testing because of deep pitting in their surface.
The Iraqi Al Raya Company was contracted to develop methods to salvage the tubes for use in rockets. Its work and subsequent reports were unclassified, contrary to practices of Iraq’s pre-1991 gas centrifuge program. The final process developed by this company required the tubes to be machined and then anodized. If the anodization showed white pits through the clear coating, the tube was rejected. Large numbers of tubes were machined and anodized, and then they were rejected as scrap.
A few hundred prototype rockets were manufactured in the year 2000. Afterwards, the al Rasheed Company took the lead in making the rockets using salvaged tubes. Production was in full swing by 2001.
The rocket production rate was about 50 rockets per day, or roughly 10,000 a year. Iraq managed to salvage fewer than 20,000 tubes from the 1980s order, or about 10 percent of that order.
By the end of 2002, Iraq had only about 7,000 good tubes left, less than enough for another year of production. In total, al Rasheed finished about 13,000 rockets. Most were painted green and shipped to military depots.
Anticipating a shortage of tubes for rockets, Iraq decided in 2000 to acquire 60,000 aluminum tubes from abroad. The first private trader was Ahmed Al Barak...."
Again, this finding created an all-but-insurmountable problem for any attempt to argue that the tubes sought in 2000-2 were not meant for rockets. Think about it: the IAEA had established that from 1998-2002 the Iraqis were engaged in systematic, active efforts to reconstitute their old 1980s tubes for use in 81-mm. rockets, and had even constructed 13 000 of the rockets themselves out of the tubes they managed to salvage. The search for the aluminum tubes therefore occurred in the midst of an ongoing Nasser-rocket construction programme -- and was, moreover, as the IAEA's documentation showed, integrally connected to it. There was an uninterrupted transition and progression between the reconstitution of the old 1980s tubes, the actual building of new rockets, and the search for new tubes to produce more rockets. They were all part of the same process. In light of these facts, any attempt to argue that the search for tubes in 2000-2 was not connected to the Iraqi rocket programme is forced to engage in ever more acrobatic, ad hoc contortions in order even to stay afloat.
On their own, these points are almost irreparably damaging to the Administration's tubes case. When they are added to everything else that was known at the time, that case becomes utterly preposterous and untenable.
Random comment. More deliberate, shameless Admin duplicity, from your Powell quote:
"First, it strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds US requirements for comparable rockets. Maybe the Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so."
(Can't you just hear the smirk?)
That is flat-out false. Contrast this passage (emphasis added) from the SSCI, p. 102:
"The DOE told Committee staff that the tolerances of the Iraqi tubes and the [U.S.] Mark-66 are very similar and that the NGIC chart is misleading because the U.S. Mark-66 specifications included 25 pages of detailed tolerances which are not shown on the chart and which were not requested by the Iraqis for their tubes. These 25 pages of tolerances show that the Mark-66 tubes are more precisely manufactured than the Iraqi tubes."
One doubts the DOE kept this information to themselves.
Posted by KM at November 30, 2005 01:06 PM