Questions I wish had been asked

Okay, so as I expect everyone knows by now, the New York Times reported on Sunday that

[i]n 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. ...

Those [high-strength aluminum] tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. ... The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery rockets.

You likely also know that Rice has admitted she was aware of the dispute at the time she made that statement

[b]ut, she said Sunday, it was not until after that television appearance that she learned "the nature of the dispute."

Several on-line commentators, particularly Bob Somerby, have already made mention of the fact that Rice is falling back on the "I see nothing! I hear nothing!" defense she used with the 9/11 Commission. For my part, though, I keep thinking of questions I wish someone in the mass media had either the brains or the guts to ask.

- Ms. Rice, you say you were aware of a dispute with regard to the tubes in September, 2002 but you didn't know the "nature" of that dispute until later. Why, considering the tubes' importance in the administration's thinking, did you take no steps to find out what the debate was about?

- When did you become aware of that "nature," i.e., that there was a body of expert opinion within the administration that the tubes were for artillery rockets, not centrifuges? Having learned of the dispute about their purpose, why didn't you retract or modify your original assertion that they could only be for centrifuges?

- The Times says that almost a year earlier, your staff had been told that Energy Department experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons. Did you know that? If so, why did you choose to ignore the judgment of the people with the most knowledge of the issue?

- If you didn't know, what does that say about the flow of information within the administration? How much trust can we put in the statements of officials whose staffs fail to keep them informed?

- In January 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency stated that the tubes could not be used for centrifuges without extensive retooling. Why did you ignore that finding?

- You told Wolf Blitzer on Sunday that then-CIA Director George Tenet and "the intelligence community as a whole believed that these were for centrifuge parts." But the Times notes that

the State Department's intelligence arm backed the Energy Department's judgment that the tubes were probably not nuclear related.

When did the State Department's intelligence arm cease to be part of the intelligence community?

- In addition, Tenet has insisted that he told administration officials of "alternate views" about the tubes in September 2002. Did he or did he not offer those caveats? If he did, why did you ignore them? If he did not, why in your opinion is he lying about it now?

- Even giving you every benefit of the doubt, it remains true that the most any intelligence service said is that they believed the tubes were intended for use as centrifuges. You, however, stated that they were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," that is, they were not suitable for anything else. (Emphasis added.) As that clearly goes beyond the actual statements of any intelligence agency, precisely what was the factual basis for that assertion?

- Finally, in light of the fact that the Iraq Survey Group has said it has found no indications that the tubes were for nuclear weapons development or that Iraq had resumed its weapons program, isn't it true that the experts at DOE and the IAEA, who you ignored, had it right and the agencies you listened to had it wrong? How, then, can we trust your judgment and that of the rest of the Bush administration in any future dispute when your judgment has been so clearly wrong on this one?