"Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. "
Well, I know you'll be as shocked as I am to learn that those additional 19 words are dodgy, too. (Not!) Walter Pincus of WaPo writes:
In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.
But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.
Of his October examples, only the aluminum tubes charge remained in January, but that allegation had a subtle caveat ...
Parseville! (as Josh Marshall has it)
... -- he described the tubes as merely "suitable" for nuclear weapons production.
... Baghdad's first attempts to purchase the aluminum tubes, more than a year earlier, had by Sept. 8 led to a fairly open disagreement in the U.S. intelligence community on whether the tubes were for centrifuges or for artillery rockets in Iraq's military program.
The intelligence estimate, completed in mid-September, reflected the different views, but the final judgment said that "most" analysts leaned toward the view that the tubes had a nuclear purpose. When the British dossier on Iraq's weapons program was published on Sept. 24, it referred to the tubes, but noted that "there is no definitive intelligence that it is destined for a nuclear program."
In his State of the Union address, Bush did not indicate any disagreement over the use of the tubes.
But the Bush administration was determined to have their war—by any means necessary. (For the politicization of the National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), the former "gold standard," see here; copy.)
Bush lies, soldiers die.
* I'm bending over backwards to be generous to the Republicans and counting the hyphenated "high-strength" as one word.
NOTE: Hey, Hel—uh, Bill! Does the Newspaper of Record have anyone, you know, covering this story? Flooding the zone? Hey, about Jeff Gerth?