Skewed Intelligence Data in March to War in Iraq: "In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb 'fairly soon.' The next month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United States had 'irrefutable evidence' - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States."
...[BUT] 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."
- posted by geoff @ #