Waas: Bush, Cheney informed in October 2002 of evidence against Iraq nukes

[BurtWorm]

This contradicts Rice's assertion in June 2003 that Bush and Cheney were ignorant of that evidence, which would explain why the admin continued pushing the idea of a reconsituted nukes program as one of the top reasons for going to war without approval of the UN.

http://hotstory.nationaljournal.com/articles/0302nj1.htm


ADMINISTRATION
What Bush Was Told About Iraq

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, March 2, 2006

Two highly classified intelligence reports delivered directly to President Bush before the Iraq war cast doubt on key public assertions made by the president, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, according to records and knowledgeable sources.

The first report, delivered to Bush in early October 2002, was a one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate that discussed whether Saddam's procurement of high-strength aluminum tubes was for the purpose of developing a nuclear weapon.

Among other things, the report stated that the Energy Department and the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research believed that the tubes were "intended for conventional weapons," a view disagreeing with that of other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, which believed that the tubes were intended for a nuclear bomb.

The disclosure that Bush was informed of the DOE and State dissents is the first evidence that the president himself knew of the sharp debate within the government over the aluminum tubes during the time that he, Cheney, and other members of the Cabinet were citing the tubes as clear evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Neither the president nor the vice president told the public about the disagreement among the agencies.

[ewagner]

1. Is somebody trying to

get rid of Bush*?

In just two days, we have the "leak" of the video tape that shows Bush lied about what he knew about Katrina before it struck and now we get this murray Waas article that shows that Bush KNEW SADDAM WASN'T A THREAT and continued to lie. over and over and over again....Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice, lied to the American people!

Somebody is putting this stuff out in machine-gun fashion to try to create a public stampede away from Bush....

:tinfoilhat: Are the powers-that-be that desperate to get rid of Bush? Is he becoming a liability to them? Is Poppy behind this?

Buckle up folks we're in for onehelluvaride.....

[BurtWorm]

2. That's an interesting theory.

Maybe there's a resistance of "realist" moles, holdovers from Poppy, inside the admin. That's the one problem with making loyalty to the Leader a more important organizational value than competence: The competent.

[texastoast]

4. Have a read. Maybe Bush just thought he was an insider

:shrug:
Why Scooter Libby is Toast and Rove will provide the butter:

And why no one connected with John Fund can get life insurance

Scooter Libby made a mistake. He thought he was a NeoCon Insider. It was a natural mistake for him to have made, his business cards, the perks, the deference, the salary, and the access to power, all spell out Insider using the usual formula for such. But he was wrong and will now find himself tossed off the back of the Sleigh of State into the gaping maws of righteous indignation, there to serve his ultimate purpose, scapegoat and distraction. The NeoCons waste nothing, not even their hapless tools, that is their environmental policy.

Your standing and importance in the NeoCon world depend not on where you graduated college, in Scooter's case Columbia University, or on your overt title or what you do in the administration, that is mostly window dressing. What matters is how important you are to the inner workings of the NeoCon Cabal. No one who came on board after 1999 is really an insider. The insiders earned that status far earlier; Insiders do the work you can't afford to have known. Therefore no matter what they must be protected.

Scooter's knowledge about the actions taken by this administration can all be parsed as missteps by those at his level. The very visibility he was allowed and his connection to so many events points not to his importance but to his expendibility. Those in this administration who know themselves to have been brought on board after 2000 who also participated in questionable activities should be contacting their attorneys and working on building up funds for their defense.

The real NeoCon Insiders are political operatives placed in media, politics, and in prominent places in the larger cultural frame.

What you do as a political operative in carrying out the covert machinations of the Plan, that is what matters; that is what determines your expendibility factor. Real insiders do not have to worry about being tossed off the back of the sleigh. For them, anything is possible in terms of defense. They know too much for it to be otherwise.

(snip)
One of the best examples of this is John Fund. He is carrying his weight as a political operative; he is not expendable though occasionally he is forced to spend time on the side lines for bad behavior.


More . . .

http://howtheneoconsstolefreedom.blogspot.com/2006/02/why-scooter-libby-is-toast-and-rove.html

[leveymg]

6. This article about John Fund is extraordinary. Read it.

Please give this its own thread. Great find!

[ewagner]

7. Thanks for the link

I'm not sure how much of that I buy....except that there were a few themes in the rather long piece that resonated very clearly....

[leveymg]

5. I think that's a distinct possibility.

Either that, or there's a pile-on effect developing here. Cheney created a negative meme with the shooting incident and then Bush got both barrels from the media over the UAE ports purchase.

There's a tipping point that's been reached, and everyone can feel it.

If this is being orchestrated, anyone wanna guess who made the decision to cast off the Captain and Officers of the sinking ship? My guess is, the CIA and Pentagon brass who okayed the IGs of both institutions to refer charges to the Justice Dept. in the Plame and OSP-AIPAC spy case. That decision was made two summers ago, and these things take time. The process of replacing the Administration is only now coming squarely into public attention.

[leveymg]

3. Bush had already invested himself in the centrifuge theory. He made that

accusation at the UN a few weeks before he got the PDB that Waas is reporting. There's an excellent write-up on this at Scientific Integrity In Policymaking: http://webexhibits.org/bush/9.html

Misrepresenting Evidence on Iran's Aluminum Tubes


Recently the press has devoted much coverage to the Bush administration’s use of faulty intelligence in making its case for war against Iraq. One particular case shows that the administration knowingly disregarded scientific analysis of intelligence data that contradicted its case.

In the weeks leading up to the war, senior administration officials repeatedly stated that Iraq had attempted to acquire more than 100,000 highstrength aluminum tubes for gas centrifuges to be used for enriching uranium. Highly enriched uranium is one of the two materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons.

This claim was made by National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney, and finally by President Bush on September 12, 2002, in his address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly. The president repeated this claim on several occasions, including his State of the Union address to Congress in January 2003. The contention was also featured in Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.57

The question before the intelligence community was whether these tubes, which in fact never reached Iraq because of a successful U.S. intervention, were meant to be used for centrifuges or for another purpose: motor casings for short-range rockets. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) advocated the view that the tubes were intended for centrifuges, and argued that the tight tolerances on the tubes’ dimensions and finish could have no other interpretation. However, a set of technical experts from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge, Livermore, and Los Alamos National Laboratories reviewed the CIA analysis and disagreed with this interpretation because the tube dimensions were far from ideal for this purpose. In fact, the dimensions and the aluminum alloy were identical to those of tubes acquired for rockets by Iraq in the 1980s. Furthermore, the Iraqis had developed and tested centrifuges before the first Gulf War that were much more capable than those that could have been built with the imported tubes. The DOE experts also pointed out that if these tubes were actually intended for centrifuges, there should be evidence of attempts by the Iraqis to acquire hundreds of thousands of other very specific components, but no such evidence existed. This critique of the CIA interpretation was seconded by the State Department’s intelligence branch and, independently, by an international group of centrifuge experts advising the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).58


SNIP