NO NUKES

Dick Cheney, 9/8/2002:

(UPI) Senior Bush administration officials on Sunday continued efforts to convince the American people that a pre-emptive strike against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would be in the best interest of the international community.

Their arguments came four days before President George W. Bush is to speak on the issue before the U.N. General Assembly that the Iraqi leader was attempting to develop nuclear weapons and other instruments of mass destruction.

"Recent developments have to do with our now being able to conclude, based on intelligence which is becoming available, that he has indeed stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons, that he has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapons, that there are efforts inside Iraq to expand his capability," said Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Washington Post, today:

According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.

Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

Most notably, investigators have judged the aluminum tubes to be "innocuous," according to Australian Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Meekin, who commands the Joint Captured Enemy Materiel Exploitation Center, the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay. That finding is pivotal, because the Bush administration built its case on the proposition that Iraq aimed to use those tubes as centrifuge rotors to enrich uranium for the core of a nuclear warhead.

Oh, but this was all part of a rich tapestry of evidence, right? Right?