Bush Aides Gave One-Sided View of Iraqi Data

Sat Oct 2, 2004 08:00 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bush administration officials, in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, gave a one-sided view of the case for believing Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arms program that ignored the doubts of their own experts, the New York Times said on Saturday.

The newspaper made the charge in an article about thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes ordered by Iraq that leading administration officials said were intended for use in uranium centrifuges.

"As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of (Saddam's) revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers," said the article on the newspaper's Web site.

It referred to remarks by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice in September 2002 in which she said the tubes, a shipment of which were intercepted in Jordan in June 2001, were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs."

The paper said that before she made the remarks, "she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all."

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