Re: Bush Rx Psychoactive Use??

From: Norman Yarvin (norman.yarvin_at_snet.net)
Date: 10/23/04 

Date: 23 Oct 2004 21:32:35 GMT

In article <79cf0a8.0410211529.6f380b55@posting.google.com>,
Steve Harris sbharris@ROMAN9.netcom.com <sbharris@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>"Rick" <me@privacy.net> wrote in message news:<2tqeqiF21rekoU1@uni-berlin.de>...
>> I'm copying the following unformatted transcript for Google's
>> archive, of a speech given last Monday by Al Gore at
>> Georgetown University. >
>> Al Gore Speaks on Iraq
>> Monday, October 18 , 2004 at 12:30pm
>> Gaston Hall, Georgetown University
>> Washington, D.C.
>
>[snip]
>
>> For example, when the President and his team were asserting that Saddam
>> Hussein had aluminum tubes that had been acquired in order to enrich
>> Uranium for atomic bombs, numerous experts at the Department of Energy
>> and elsewhere in the intelligence community were certain that the
>> information being presented by the President was completely wrong. The
>> true experts on Uranium enrichment are at Oak Ridge, in my home state
>> of Tennessee. And they told me early on that in their opinion there was
>> virtually zero possibility whatsoever that the tubes in question were
>> for the purpose of enrichment - and yet they received a directive
>> forbidding them from making any public statement that disagreed with
>> the President's assertions.
>
>
>COMMENT:
>
>Hope the "experts" told Gore that "uranium" is not capitalized, any
>more than aluminum is. A mistake he makes twice.
>
>BTW, what the hell were these fancy finely machined aluminum tubes
>used for, anyway?? They impressed me mightily at the time, the best
>prop that Powell had. So if not for centrifuges, then what? Anybody?
>I notice Gore doesn't say, either.

He doesn't want to dismay the pacifists, who wouldn't enjoy hearing that
the tubes were used for artillery rockets -- to be precise, that they
were the main bodies (casings; combustion chambers) of 81mm solid-fuel
rockets. That's what the Iraqis said when they were caught importing
them, and the story didn't change when they no longer had to fear
Saddam's torturers -- although it was expanded a bit: they didn't
actually need the relatively-tight tolerances, but their engineers were
being ridden hard by management to *do something* to improve the rockets'
accuracy, and asking their foreign suppliers to make the tubes more
precisely was a lot easier than figuring out what was really making the
rockets inaccurate and fixing it. The Duelfer report has the details;
see

http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/

It's a huge download, but worth it, as it's well written (having much
less bureaucratese than most government reports). The aluminum-tube
stuff is in volume 2. The technical judgement shown by the US government
was worse than you imagine: the tubes actually weren't finely machined;
the wall thickness tolerance was 0.1mm (on an 81mm tube with 3.1mm wall
thickness, 900mm long). My guess is that that tolerance can be achieved
just by good control of the extrusion process, without any machining.
The price was around $15 per tube, for anodized 7075-T6 aluminum.

        (For comparison, onlinemetals.com gives me a price of $25.36 for
        a 6061-T6 aluminum tube (a weaker and less expensive alloy) of
        3ft (914mm) length, 3in (76mm) diameter, 0.125 inch (3.175mm)
        thickness, and 0.013 inch (0.33mm) thickness tolerance. Clearly
        the Iraqis got a better price, presumably because they ordered
        tens of thousands of the tubes, whereas the onlinemetals price is
        for a quantity of one.)

The New York Times had a decent article (which fed off the investigation
done by the Senate Intelligence Committee) on October 3 about who was
actually responsible for deciding that the tubes were suspicious. The
headline pointed at Bush, of course, but the article itself said that it
wasn't any of the politicians, but the CIA, notably some guy named "Joe"
in their "Winpac" division. For some sort of privacy/security reason,
they couldn't print his full name, but the CIA was in charge of
summarizing the views of the rest of the government (that being part of
their statutory responsibilities), and the CIA considered Joe an expert,
since he'd worked at Oak Ridge (albeit mostly not on centrifuges); so he
and they ran roughshod over the real experts (including the ones Gore
refers to).

The politicians (Democrat and Republican alike) seem to have all been
"big picture" guys, who relied on the bureaucrats to get the technical
details right, and who, if they ever asked what those "suspicious"
tolerances actually were, in hard numbers, never had the reaction "Hey,
I've machined things myself to tolerances a lot tighter than 0.1mm!".
(According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the Oak Ridge
experts thought that 0.01mm would be more like it for centrifuge use.)

But then the whole sanctions business was a fool's errand from the very
beginning. The idea that Saddam would be nice and harmless so long as he
didn't have any nasty weapons was crazy; so was the idea that we could
monitor him well enough to ensure that he didn't have any nasty weapons.
Asked to monitor, our intelligence agencies first erred one way, letting
the Iraqis get away with concealing weapons, then (after 1995, when
Hussein Kamel defected and revealed the concealment) erred the other way,
thinking they had prohibited weapons when they mostly didn't. (They do
seem to have been making quantities of chemical/biological poisons
sufficient for terrorist purposes, or at least trying to -- the Duelfer
report has many pages on this -- but they weren't making the hundreds of
tons needed for military use.) 

-- 
Norman Yarvin						http://yarchive.net
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