Fast Fiction

Yes, it’s a very, very long article. But if you plan to live on this planet, you must read this.

How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence
By DAVID BARSTOW, WILLIAM J. BROAD and JEFF GERTH

Need a login/password?

Basically the article goes through much of the case against Iraq and the evidence of their weapons of mass destruction point by point. My favorite part is how the basis of the US’s case against Iraq was the fact that they were trying to get these little aluminum tubes (probably for conventional missiles) but some posited that they could be used for uranium purifcation through centrifuges. The consultants working on the hypothesis that Iraq concluded:

The Energy Department team concluded it was “unlikely that anyone” could build a centrifuge site capable of producing significant amounts of enriched uranium “based on these tubes.” One analyst summed it up this way: the tubes were so poorly suited for centrifuges, he told Senate investigators, that if Iraq truly wanted to use them this way, “we should just give them the tubes.”