Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page A01
In their march to Baghdad on April 8, U.S. Marines charged past a row of eucalyptus trees that lined the boneyard of Iraq's thwarted nuclear dream. Sixty acres of warehouses behind the tree line, held under United Nations seal at Ash Shaykhili, stored machine tools, consoles and instruments from the nuclear weapons program cut short by the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
---snip---
That equipment, and Iraq's effort to buy more of it overseas, were central to the Bush administration's charge that President Saddam Hussein had resumed long-dormant efforts to build a nuclear weapon. The lead combat units had more urgent priorities that day, but they were not alone in passing the stockpiles by. Participants in the subsequent hunt for illegal arms said months elapsed without a visit to Nasr and many other sites of activity that President Bush had called "a grave and gathering danger."
According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia,
it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration's prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
----snip---
Administration officials interviewed for this report defended the integrity of the government's prewar intelligence and public statements. None agreed to be interviewed on the record. Vice President Cheney, in a televised interview last month, referred to a National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which said among other things that there was "compelling evidence that Saddam is reconstituting a uranium enrichment effort." Cheney said investigators searching for confirmation of those judgments "will find in fact that they are valid." His office did not respond to questions on Friday.
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Joe's Return
[br />According to close associates, Obeidi expected to speak to a peer among U.S. centrifuge physicists. He was dismayed, they said, to find that his principal interrogator lacked those credentials.
The man's name was Joe. An engineer with expertise in export controls, Joe made his reputation at the CIA as the strongest proponent of the theory that Iraq's controversial aluminum tubes were part of a resurgent centrifuge program. The CIA asked that Joe's last name be withheld to protect his safety.
In his interviews, Obeidi did not tell Joe what he wanted to hear, U.S. government officials said. Instead, Obeidi confirmed the account laid out in Volume 7 of Iraq's December nuclear disclosure, which said there had been "no nuclear activity since 1991" at seven of the program's previous sites and only "medical, agricultural and industrial" activities at the others.
The centrifuge program died in 1991, Obeidi said, and never resumed. He had buried the documents to prepare for resumption orders that never came. He had nothing to do with the aluminum tubes, he said, and a centrifuge program would have no use for them.
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