[casi] Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence -for the archives

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39500-2003Aug9.html

Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence
By Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, August 10, 2003; Page A01 His name was Joe, from the U.S. government.
He carried 40 classified slides and a message from the Bush administration.

An engineer-turned-CIA analyst, Joe had helped build the U.S. government case
that Iraq posed a nuclear threat. He landed in Vienna on Jan. 22 and drove to
the U.S. diplomatic mission downtown. In a conference room 32 floors above
the Danube River, he told United Nations nuclear inspectors they were making a
serious mistake. At issue was Iraq's efforts to buy high-strength aluminum
tubes. The U.S. government said those tubes were for centrifuges to enrich uranium
for a nuclear bomb. But the IAEA, the world's nuclear watchdog, had uncovered
strong evidence that Iraq was using them for conventional rockets. Joe
described the rocket story as a transparent Iraqi lie. According to people familiar
with his presentation, which circulated before and afterward among government
and outside specialists, Joe said the specialized aluminum in the tubes was
"overspecified," "inappropriate" and "excessively strong." No one, he told the
inspectors, would waste the costly alloy on a rocket. In fact, there was just
such a rocket. According to knowledgeable U.S. and overseas sources, experts
from U.S. national laboratories reported in December to the Energy Department
and U.S. intelligence analysts that Iraq was manufacturing copies of the
Italian-made Medusa 81. Not only the Medusa's alloy, but also its dimensions, to the
fraction of a millimeter, matched the disputed aluminum tubes. A CIA spokesman
asked that Joe's last name be withheld for his safety, and said he would not
be made available for an interview. The spokesman said the tubes in question
"are not the same as the Medusa 81" but would not identify what distinguishes
them. In an interview, CIA Director George J. Tenet said several different U.S.
intelligence agencies believed the tubes could be used to build gas
centrifuges for a uranium enrichment program. The Vienna briefing was one among many
private and public forums in which the Bush administration portrayed a menacing
Iraqi nuclear threat, even as important features of its evidence were being
undermined. There were other White House assertions about forbidden weapons
programs, including biological and chemical arms, for which there was consensus
among analysts. But the danger of a nuclear-armed Saddam Hussein, more potent as
an argument for war, began with weaker evidence and grew weaker still in the
three months before war. This article is based on interviews with analysts and
policymakers inside and outside the U.S. government, and access to internal
documents and technical evidence not previously made public. The new
information indicates a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their
subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting
Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent
in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion
administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White
House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in
information upon which it had previously relied: • Bush and others often alleged
that President Hussein held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists,
but did not disclose that the known work of the scientists was largely benign.
Iraq's three top gas centrifuge experts, for example, ran a copper factory, an
operation to extract graphite from oil and a mechanical engineering design
center at Rashidiya. • The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of October 2002
cited new construction at facilities once associated with Iraq's nuclear
program, but analysts had no reliable information at the time about what was
happening under the roofs. By February, a month before the war, U.S. government
specialists on the ground in Iraq had seen for themselves that there were no
forbidden activities at the sites. • Gas centrifuge experts consulted by the U.S.
government said repeatedly for more than a year that the aluminum tubes were not
suitable or intended for uranium enrichment. By December 2002, the experts
said new evidence had further undermined the government's assertion. The Bush
administration portrayed the scientists as a minority and emphasized that the
experts did not describe the centrifuge theory as impossible. • In the weeks and
months following Joe's Vienna briefing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
and others continued to describe the use of such tubes for rockets as an
implausible hypothesis, even after U.S. analysts collected and photographed in Iraq a
virtually identical tube marked with the logo of the Medusa's Italian
manufacturer and the words, in English, "81mm rocket." • The escalation of nuclear
rhetoric a year ago, including the introduction of the term "mushroom cloud"
into the debate, coincided with the formation of a White House Iraq Group, or
WHIG, a task force assigned to "educate the public" about the threat from
Hussein, as a participant put it. Two senior policymakers, who supported the war,
said in unauthorized interviews that the administration greatly overstated Iraq's
near-term nuclear potential. "I never cared about the 'imminent threat,' "
said one of the policymakers, with directly relevant responsibilities. "The
threat was there in [Hussein's] presence in office. To me, just knowing what it
takes to have a nuclear weapons program, he needed a lot of equipment. You can
stare at the yellowcake [uranium ore] all you want. You need to convert it to
gas and enrich it. That does not constitute an imminent threat, and the people
who were saying that, I think, did not fully appreciate the difficulties and
effort involved in producing the nuclear material and the physics package." No
White House, Pentagon or State Department policymaker agreed to speak on the
record for this report about the administration's nuclear case. Answering
questions Thursday before the National Association of Black Journalists, national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice said she is "certain to this day that this
regime was a threat, that it was pursuing a nuclear weapon, that it had
biological and chemical weapons, that it had used them." White House officials
referred all questions of detail to Tenet. In an interview and a four-page written
statement, Tenet defended the NIE prepared under his supervision in October. In
that estimate, U.S. intelligence analysts judged that Hussein was intent on
acquiring a nuclear weapon and was trying to rebuild the capability to make one.
"We stand behind the judgments of the NIE" based on the evidence available at
the time, Tenet said, and "the soundness and integrity of our process." The
estimate was "the product of years of reporting and intelligence collection,
analyzed by numerous experts in several different agencies." Tenet said the time
to "decide who was right and who was wrong" about prewar intelligence will
not come until the Iraqi Survey Group, the CIA-directed, U.S. military postwar
study in Iraq of Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs is completed.
The Bush administration has said this will require months or years. Facts and
Doubts

The possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq loomed large in the Bush
administration's efforts to convince the American public of the need for a preemptive
strike. Beginning last August, Cheney portrayed Hussein's nuclear ambitions as a
"mortal threat" to the United States. In the fall and winter, Rice, then Bush,
marshaled the dreaded image of a "mushroom cloud." By many accounts, including
those of career officials who did not support the war, there were good
reasons for concern that the Iraqi president might revive a program to enrich
uranium to weapons grade and fabricate a working bomb. He had a well-demonstrated
aspiration for nuclear weapons, a proficient scientific and engineering cadre, a
history of covert development and a domestic supply of unrefined uranium ore.
Iraq was generally believed to have kept the technical documentation for two
advanced German centrifuge designs and the assembly diagrams for at least one
type of "implosion device," which detonates a nuclear core. What Hussein did
not have was the principal requirement for a nuclear weapon, a sufficient
quantity of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. And the U.S. government,
authoritative intelligence officials said, had only circumstantial evidence that Iraq
was trying to obtain those materials. But the Bush administration had reasons
to imagine the worst. The CIA had faced searing criticism for its failures to
foresee India's resumption of nuclear testing in 1998 and to "connect the
dots" pointing to al Qaeda's attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Cheney, the
administration's most influential advocate of a worst-case analysis, had been powerfully
influenced by his experience as defense secretary just after the Persian Gulf War
of 1991. Former National Security Council official Richard A. Clarke recalled
how information from freshly seized Iraqi documents disclosed the existence
of a "crash program" to build a bomb in 1991. The CIA had known nothing of it.
"I can understand why that was a seminal experience for Cheney," Clarke said.
"And when the CIA says [in 2002], 'We don't have any evidence,' his reaction
is . . . 'We didn't have any evidence in 1991, either. Why should I believe you
now?' " Some strategists, in and out of government, argued that the
uncertainty itself -- in the face of circumstantial evidence -- was sufficient to
justify "regime change." But that was not what the Bush administration usually said
to the American people. To gird a nation for the extraordinary step of
preemptive war -- and to obtain the minimum necessary support from allies, Congress
and the U.N. Security Council -- the administration described a growing, even
imminent, nuclear threat from Iraq. 'Nuclear Blackmail'

The unveiling of that message began a year ago this week. Cheney raised the
alarm about Iraq's nuclear menace three times in August. He was far ahead of
the president's public line. Only Bush and Cheney know, one senior policy
official said, "whether Cheney was trying to push the president or they had decided
to play good cop, bad cop." On Aug. 7, Cheney volunteered in a
question-and-answer session at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, speaking of Hussein,
that "left to his own devices, it's the judgment of many of us that in the
not-too-distant future, he will acquire nuclear weapons." On Aug. 26, he described
Hussein as a "sworn enemy of our country" who constituted a "mortal threat"
to the United States. He foresaw a time in which Hussein could "subject the
United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail." "We now know that Saddam
has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he said. "Among other
sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including
Saddam's own son-in-law." That was a reference to Hussein Kamel, who had managed
Iraq's special weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan. But
Saddam Hussein lured Kamel back to Iraq, and he was killed in February 1996, so
Kamel could not have sourced what U.S. officials "now know." And Kamel's
testimony, after defecting, was the reverse of Cheney's description. In one of many
debriefings by U.S., Jordanian and U.N. officials, Kamel said on Aug. 22, 1995,
that Iraq's uranium enrichment programs had not resumed after halting at the
start of the Gulf War in 1991. According to notes typed for the record by U.N.
arms inspector Nikita Smidovich, Kamel acknowledged efforts to design three
different warheads, "but not now, before the Gulf War." 'Educating the Public'

Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card
Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage
of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its
work called it "an internal working group, like many formed for priority
issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its
responsibilities." In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not
mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. "From a marketing point of view, you
don't introduce new products in August," he said. The group met weekly in the
Situation Room. Among the regular participants were Karl Rove, the
president's senior political adviser; communications strategists Karen Hughes, Mary
Matalin and James R. Wilkinson; legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio; and policy
advisers led by Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, along with I. Lewis
Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. The first days of September would bring some of
the most important decisions of the prewar period: what to demand of the
United Nations in the president's Sept. 12 address to the General Assembly, when to
take the issue to Congress, and how to frame the conflict with Iraq in the
midterm election campaign that began in earnest after Labor Day. A "strategic
communications" task force under the WHIG began to plan speeches and white
papers. There were many themes in the coming weeks, but Iraq's nuclear menace was
among the most prominent. 'A Mushroom Cloud'

The day after publication of Card's marketing remark, Bush and nearly all his
top advisers began to talk about the dangers of an Iraqi nuclear bomb. Bush
and Prime Minister Tony Blair conferred at Camp David that Saturday, Sept. 7,
and they each described alarming new evidence. Blair said proof that the threat
is real came in "the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency this
morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites."
Bush said "a report came out of the . . . IAEA, that they [Iraqis] were six
months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need."
There was no new IAEA report. Blair appeared to be referring to news reports
describing curiosity at the nuclear agency about repairs at sites of Iraq's
former nuclear program. Bush cast as present evidence the contents of a report
from 1996, updated in 1998 and 1999. In those accounts, the IAEA described the
history of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that arms inspectors had
systematically destroyed. A White House spokesman later acknowledged that Bush "was
imprecise" on his source but stood by the crux of his charge. The spokesman said
U.S. intelligence, not the IAEA, had given Bush his information. That, too, was
garbled at best. U.S. intelligence reports had only one scenario for an Iraqi
bomb in six months to a year, premised on Iraq's immediate acquisition of
enough plutonium or enriched uranium from a foreign source. "That is just about
the same thing as saying that if Iraq gets a bomb, it will have a bomb," said a
U.S. intelligence analyst who covers the subject. "We had no evidence for it."
Two debuts took place on Sept. 8: the aluminum tubes and the image of "a
mushroom cloud." A Sunday New York Times story quoted anonymous officials as
saying the "diameter, thickness and other technical specifications" of the tubes --
precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts --
showed that they were "intended as components of centrifuges." No one knows when
Iraq will have its weapon, the story said, but "the first sign of a 'smoking
gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud." Top officials made the rounds of
Sunday talk shows that morning. Rice's remarks echoed the newspaper story. She
said on CNN's "Late Edition" that Hussein was "actively pursuing a nuclear
weapon" and that the tubes -- described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as
"dual-use" items -- were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs,
centrifuge programs." "There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he
can acquire nuclear weapons," Rice added, "but we don't want the smoking gun
to be a mushroom cloud." Anna Perez, a communications adviser to Rice, said
Rice did not come looking for an opportunity to say that. "There was nothing in
her mind that said, 'I have to push the nuclear issue,' " Perez said, "but
Wolf [Blitzer] asked the question." Powell, a confidant said, found it
"disquieting when people say things like mushroom clouds." But he contributed in other
ways to the message. When asked about biological and chemical arms on Fox News,
he brought up nuclear weapons and cited the "specialized aluminum tubing"
that "we saw in reporting just this morning." Cheney, on NBC's "Meet the Press,"
also mentioned the tubes and said "increasingly, we believe the United States
will become the target" of an Iraqi nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld, on CBS's "Face the Nation," asked listeners to "imagine a
September 11th with weapons of mass destruction," which would kill "tens of thousands
of innocent men, women and children." Bush evoked the mushroom cloud on Oct.
7, and on Nov. 12 Gen. Tommy R. Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, said
inaction might bring "the sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the major
population centers on this planet." 'Literary License'

In its initial meetings, Card's Iraq task force ordered a series of white
papers. After a general survey of Iraqi arms violations, the first of the
single-subject papers -- never published -- was "A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam
Hussein's Quest for Nuclear Weapons." Wilkinson, at the time White House
deputy director of communications for planning, gathered a yard-high stack of
intelligence reports and press clippings. Wilkinson said he conferred with experts
from the National Security Council and Cheney's office. Other officials said
Will Tobey and Susan Cook, working under senior director for
counterproliferation Robert Joseph, made revisions and circulated some of the drafts. Under the
standard NSC review process, they checked the facts. In its later stages, the
draft white paper coincided with production of a National Intelligence
Estimate and its unclassified summary. But the WHIG, according to three officials
who followed the white paper's progress, wanted gripping images and stories not
available in the hedged and austere language of intelligence. The fifth draft
of the paper was obtained by The Washington Post. White House spokesmen
dismissed the draft as irrelevant because Rice decided not to publish it. Wilkinson
said Rice and Joseph felt the paper "was not strong enough." The document
offers insight into the Bush administration's priorities and methods in shaping a
nuclear message. The white paper was assembled by some of the same team, and
at the same time, as the speeches and talking points prepared for the president
and top officials. A senior intelligence official said last October that the
president's speechwriters took "literary license" with intelligence, a phrase
applicable to language used by administration officials in some of the white
paper's most emotive and misleading assertions elsewhere. The draft white paper
precedes other known instances in which the Bush administration considered
the now-discredited claim that Iraq "sought uranium oxide, an essential
ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa." For a speechwriter, uranium was
valuable as an image because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb.
Despite warnings from intelligence analysts, the uranium would return again
and again, including the Jan. 28 State of the Union address and three other Bush
administration statements that month. Other errors and exaggerations in
public White House claims were repeated, or had their first mention, in the white
paper. Much as Blair did at Camp David, the paper attributed to U.N. arms
inspectors a statement that satellite photographs show "many signs of the
reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear program." Inspectors did not say
that. The paper also quoted the first half of a sentence from a Time magazine
interview with U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix: "You can see hundreds of
new roofs in these photos." The second half of the sentence, not quoted, was:
"but you don't know what's under them." As Bush did, the white paper cited
the IAEA's description of Iraq's defunct nuclear program in language that
appeared to be current. The draft said, for example, that "since the beginning of
the nineties, Saddam has launched a crash program to divert nuclear reactor fuel
for . . . nuclear weapons." The crash program began in late 1990 and ended
with the war in January 1991. The reactor fuel, save for waste products, is
gone. 'Footnotes and Disclaimers'

A senior intelligence official said the White House preferred to avoid a
National Intelligence Estimate, a formal review of competing evidence and
judgments, because it knew "there were disagreements over details in almost every
aspect of the administration's case against Iraq." The president's advisers, the
official said, did not want "a lot of footnotes and disclaimers." But Bush
needed bipartisan support for war-making authority in Congress. In early
September, members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began asking why
there had been no authoritative estimate of the danger posed by Iraq. Sen. Richard
J. Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote Sept. 9 of his "concern that the views of the U.S.
intelligence community are not receiving adequate attention by policymakers in
both Congress and the executive branch." When Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), then
committee chairman, insisted on an NIE in a classified letter two days later,
Tenet agreed. Explicitly intended to assist Congress in deciding whether to
authorize war, the estimate was produced in two weeks, an extraordinary deadline
for a document that usually takes months. Tenet said in an interview that "we
had covered parts of all those programs over 10 years through NIEs and other
reports, and we had a ton of community product on all these issues." Even so,
the intelligence community was now in a position of giving its first
coordinated answer to a question that every top national security official had already
answered. "No one outside the intelligence community told us what to say or not
to say," Tenet wrote in reply to questions for this article. The U.S.
government possessed no specific information on Iraqi efforts to acquire enriched
uranium, according to six people who participated in preparing for the estimate.
It knew only that Iraq sought to buy equipment of the sort that years of
intelligence reports had said "may be" intended for or "could be" used in uranium
enrichment. Richard J. Kerr, a former CIA deputy director now leading a review
of the agency's intelligence analysis about Iraq, said in an interview that
the CIA collected almost no hard information about Iraq's weapons programs after
the departure of IAEA and U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, arms inspectors
during the Clinton administration. He said that was because of a lack of
spies inside Iraq. Tenet took issue with that view, saying in an interview, "When
inspectors were pushed out in 1998, we did not sit back. . . . The fact is we
made significant professional progress." In his written statement, he cited
new evidence on biological and missile programs, but did not mention Hussein's
nuclear pursuits. The estimate's "Key Judgment" said: "Although we assess that
Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any,
he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started
reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that UNSCOM inspectors
departed -- December 1998." According to Kerr, the analysts had good reasons to say
that, but the reasons were largely "inferential." Hussein was known to have
met with some weapons physicists, and praised them as "nuclear mujaheddin." But
the CIA had "reasonably good intelligence in terms of the general activities
and whereabouts" of those scientists, said another analyst with the relevant
clearances, and knew they had generally not reassembled into working groups. In
a report to Congress in 2001, the agency could conclude only that some of the
scientists "probably" had "continued at least low-level theoretical R&D
[research and development] associated with its nuclear program." Analysts knew Iraq
had tried recently to buy magnets, high-speed balancing machines, machine
tools and other equipment that had some potential for use in uranium enrichment,
though no less for conventional industry. Even assuming the intention, the
parts could not all be made to fit a coherent centrifuge model. The estimate
acknowledged that "we lack specific information on many key aspects" of the
program, and analysts presumed they were seeing only the tip of the iceberg. 'He
Made a Name'

According to outside scientists and intelligence officials, the most
important factor in the CIA's nuclear judgment was Iraq's attempt to buy high-strength
aluminum tubes. The tubes were the core evidence for a centrifuge program
tied to building a nuclear bomb. Even circumstantially, the CIA reported no
indication of uranium enrichment using anything but centrifuges. That
interpretation of the tubes was a victory for the man named Joe, who made the issue his
personal crusade. He worked in the gas centrifuge program at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in the early 1980s. He is not, associates said, a nuclear physicist,
but an engineer whose work involved the platform upon which centrifuges were
mounted. At some point he joined the CIA. By the end of the 1990s, according
to people who know him casually, he worked in export controls. Joe played an
important role in discovering Iraq's plans to buy aluminum tubes from China in
2000, with an Australian intermediary. U.N. sanctions forbade Iraq to buy
anything with potential military applications, and members of the Nuclear Suppliers
Group, a voluntary alliance, include some forms of aluminum tubing on their
list of equipment that could be used for uranium enrichment. Joe saw the tubes
as centrifuge rotors that could be used to process uranium into weapons-grade
material. In a gas centrifuge, the rotor is a thin-walled cylinder, open at
both ends, that spins at high speed under a magnet. The device extracts the
material used in a weapon from a gaseous form of uranium. In July 2001, about
3,000 tubes were intercepted in Jordan on their way to Iraq, a big step forward in
the agency's efforts to understand what Iraq was trying to do. The CIA gave
Joe an award for exceptional performance, throwing its early support to an
analysis that helped change the agency's mind about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear
ambitions. "He grabbed that information early on, and he made a name for himself,"
a career U.S. government nuclear expert said. 'Stretches the Imagination'

Doubts about Joe's theory emerged quickly among the government's centrifuge
physicists. The intercepted tubes were too narrow, long and thick-walled to fit
a known centrifuge design. Aluminum had not been used for rotors since the
1950s. Iraq had two centrifuge blueprints, stolen in Europe, that were far more
efficient and already known to work. One used maraging steel, a hard steel
alloy, for the rotors, the other carbon fiber. Joe and his supporters said the
apparent drawbacks were part of Iraq's concealment plan. Hussein's history of
covert weapons development, Tenet said in his written statement, included
"built-in cover stories." "This is a case where different people had honorable and
different interpretations of intentions," said an Energy Department analyst who
has reviewed the raw data. "If you go to a nuclear [counterproliferation
official] and say I've got these aluminum tubes, and it's about Iraq, his first
inclination is to say it's for nuclear use." But the government's centrifuge
scientists -- at the Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and its
sister institutions -- unanimously regarded this possibility as implausible. In
late 2001, experts at Oak Ridge asked an alumnus, Houston G. Wood III, to
review the controversy. Wood, founder of the Oak Ridge centrifuge physics
department, is widely acknowledged to be among the most eminent living experts.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Wood said in an interview that "it would have
been extremely difficult to make these tubes into centrifuges. It stretches
the imagination to come up with a way. I do not know any real centrifuge experts
that feel differently." As an academic, Wood said, he would not describe
"anything that you absolutely could not do." But he said he would "like to see, if
they're going to make that claim, that they have some explanation of how you
do that. Because I don't see how you do it." A CIA spokesman said the agency
does have support for its view from centrifuge experts. He declined to
elaborate. In the last week of September, the development of the NIE required a
resolution of the running disagreement over the significance of the tubes. The
Energy Department had one vote. Four agencies -- with specialties including
eavesdropping, maps and foreign military forces -- judged that the tubes were part of
a centrifuge program that could be used for nuclear weapons. Only the State
Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research joined the judgment of the
Energy Department. The estimate, as published, said that "most analysts" believed
the tubes were suitable and intended for a centrifuge cascade. Majority votes
make poor science, said Peter D. Zimmerman, a former chief scientist at the
Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "In this case, the experts were at Z
Division at Livermore [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] and in DOE
intelligence here in town, and they were convinced that no way in hell were these
likely to be centrifuge tubes," he said. Tenet said the Department of Energy was
not the only agency with experts on the issue; the CIA consulted military
battlefield rocket experts, as well as its own centrifuge experts. Unravelings

On Feb. 5, two weeks after Joe's Vienna briefing, Powell gave what remains
the government's most extensive account of the aluminum tubes, in an address to
the U.N. Security Council. He did not mention the existence of the Medusa
rocket or its Iraqi equivalent, though he acknowledged disagreement among U.S.
intelligence analysts about the use of the tubes. Powell's CIA briefers, using
data originating with Joe, told him th


Roger Stroope
Northern Arizona University
Flagstaff USA

~Just 10% of our military budget spent yearly on the United States could give
every high school graduate a college education for four years.

~The proposed $48 billion increase in military spending for next year (2004)
is bigger than the total military budget of any other country on earth.





























































































































































































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