New York Times Slips; Commits Actual Journalism

Holy crap! The New York Times has published an outstanding story on the Bush administration's pre-war claims about Iraq's purported nuclear program. I feel like I've fallen into a bizarre alternate universe where the media actually reports on things.

Yes, the story is 10,000 words long and published on a Saturday, so no one will read it. (CORRECTION: The story was posted on the New York Times website on Saturday, October 2, but appears in the next day's Sunday print edition.) And yes, almost everything in it has been previously covered, mostly by the Washington Post. But the reporters and editors involved still deserve a great deal of credit for putting it all together in one place and adding new information.

If for some reason you have better things to do on a Saturday than examine this story in minute detail, let me summarize four of the lies it picks up on. I'm particularly pleased because I've been yammering since before the war about the first two lies (by Cheney and Rice).

1. Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002, Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd Convention:

... we now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources, we've gotten this from the firsthand testimony of defectors -- including Saddam's own son-in-law, who was subsequently murdered at Saddam's direction.

This Cheney speech was the kickoff for the Bush administration case for war. And this was probably the most egregious, cut and dried lie they told during the entire push for war. As the Times story points out:

In his Nashville speech, Mr. Cheney had not mentioned the aluminum tubes or any other fresh intelligence when he said, "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." The one specific source he did cite was Hussein Kamel al-Majid, a son-in-law of Mr. Hussein's who defected in 1994 after running Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. But Mr. Majid told American intelligence officials in 1995 that Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled. What's more, Mr. Majid could not have had any insight into Mr. Hussein's current nuclear activities: he was assassinated in 1996 on his return to Iraq.

This New York Times account in completely right, except for one small weird error -- Kamel defected in 1995, not 1994. So: Cheney was lying.

2. Condoleezza Rice, September 7, 2002, Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer (via Nexis):

We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance -- into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.

New York Times:

Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times has found. Months before, her staff had been told that these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets.

But Ms. Rice, and other senior administration officials, embraced a disputed theory about the tubes first championed in April 2001 by a new analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Senior scientists considered the theory implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as an administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.

"She was aware of the differences of opinion," the senior administration official said of Ms. Rice in an interview authorized by the White House. "She was also aware that at the highest level of the intelligence community, there was great confidence that these tubes were for centrifuges."

Ms. Rice's alarming description on CNN was in keeping with the administration's overall treatment of the tubes. Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, The Times found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of their own experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public...

American nuclear and intelligence experts argued bitterly over the tubes... the opinions of the nuclear experts were seemingly disregarded at every turn...

But if the tubes were not for a centrifuge, what were they for?

Within weeks, the Energy Department experts had an answer.

It turned out, they reported, that Iraq had for years used high-strength aluminum tubes to make combustion chambers for slim rockets fired from launcher pods...

The tubes now sought by Iraq had precisely the same dimensions - a perfect match.

This finding was published May 9, 2001, in the Daily Intelligence Highlight, a secret Energy Department newsletter published on Intelink, a Web site for the intelligence community and the White House.

So: Rice was lying.

3. "An administration official," New York Times, September 13, 2002, "White House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned Weapons" by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon

An administration official called discussions about the aluminum tubes and Iraq's intentions "a normal part of the intelligence process."...

"There are tubes and then there are tubes," the administration official said. He added that the best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported the C.I.A. assessment [that the tubes were meant for a nuclear program].

That was the New York Times then. This is New York Times today:

At the Energy Department, those examining the tubes included scientists who had spent decades designing and working on centrifuges, and intelligence officers steeped in the tricky business of tracking the nuclear ambitions of America's enemies... On questions about nuclear centrifuges, this was unambiguously the A-Team of the intelligence community, many experts say...

They concluded that using the tubes in centrifuges "is credible but unlikely, and a rocket production is the much more likely end use for these tubes."

So: whoever this administration official was, he was lying.

4. Colin Powell, February 5, 2003, Remarks to the United Nations Security Council

...it strikes me as quite odd that these tubes are manufactured to a tolerance that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets. Maybe Iraqis just manufacture their conventional weapons to a higher standard than we do, but I don't think so.

New York Times:

... in a memo written two days earlier, Mr. Powell's intelligence experts had specifically cautioned him about those very same words. "In fact," they explained, "the most comparable U.S. system is a tactical rocket - the U.S. Mark 66 air-launched 70-millimeter rocket - that uses the same, high-grade (7075-T6) aluminum, and that has specifications with similar tolerances."

So: Colin Powell was lying.

Now, I realize none of this makes any difference. Bush supporters will never accept any amount of evidence that the Bush administration lies. And other sectors of American power may accept it, but don't care.

Still, I'm going to write to the public editor of the New York Times for the first time in my life, complimenting the paper for this story and asking him to forward it to the reporters and editors who worked on. If you feel like doing the same, the address is public@nytimes.com