US/IRAQ: A year before senior members of the Bush administration claimed that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, US nuclear experts told the staff of national security adviser Ms Condoleezza Rice that aluminium tubes sought by Saddam Hussein were almost certainly not for use in developing a nuclear programme, the New York Times disclosed yesterday.
However in the run-up to the March 2003 war, Ms Rice said on television in 2002 that the Iraqi president was trying to obtain high-strength aluminium tubes to rebuild his nuclear weapons programme.
They were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programmes," she stated on September 8th, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a nuclear cloud." Yesterday Ms Rice said she was aware of a debate within the US intelligence community about whether the tubes were intended for nuclear weapons.
"I knew that there was a dispute. I actually didn't really know the nature of the dispute," she said when challenged about the Times report on ABC's This Week.
In September 2002, the Vice-President, Mr Dick Cheney, said the US had "irrefutable evidence" of Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme in the form of thousands of high-strength aluminium tubes. The Times cited four CIA officials and two senior administration officials who said that it was always accepted the tubes were for artillery rockets and only one junior analyst at the CIA believed it plausible that they were for nuclear weapons.
"What the Times article is saying is that the top nuclear experts in the country said those aluminium tubes were not for nuclear weapons, and that this was suppressed by the administration, particularly Vice-President Cheney," said Kerry campaign foreign policy adviser Mr Richard Holbrooke.