Telling the Policymakers What They Want To Hear

I just read the fine article in Sunday's New York Times regarding how the White House and the CIA embraced the centrifuge theory, not the rocket theory, as the end-use for Iraqi anodized aluminum tubes seized in Jordan in 2001, even though all the American centrifuge experts at the Energy Department rejected the centrifuge hypothesis outright.

Like the Space Shuttle engineers worried about foam-impact damage to the Columbia, or O-ring problems on the Challenger, the Energy Department experts were thrust, by the CIA, into the position of having to prove a negative proposition, that the tubes couldn't be used for centrifuges, an inherently difficult, even impossible argument to make, especially when no one wanted to hear it.

Of course, all the CIA was doing was whipping the bureaucracies into line to support war-making rationales they knew the Bush Administration wanted to hear (even though their job isn't to whip anybody, but to analyze intelligence). It didn't help, of course, that Iraqi expatriate nuclear engineers like Dr. Hamza were beating the war drum with congressional testimony televised on C-SPAN.