Various lefty pundits have excoriated the President for stating that Iraq had bought aluminum tubes for uranium purification. Not true, they argued – such tubes could be used for a conventional rocketry program or other non-nuclear purposes.
Except that analysis is itself on shaky ground.
"We believe…that these tubes are of the fineness and kind of tooling and workmanship that is definitely consistent with the use of enriching uranium," U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said Wednesday.
"The way in which Iraq has gone about trying to procure those tubes suggests quite clearly that they were trying to do something illicit," he told reporters.
Even ElBaradei, who first quashed the nuclear connection, has admitted that the tubes could be modified for enrichment purposes, and that some may in fact be of the necessary strength to work unmodified.
It is clear that one cannot simply brush aside the issue of this procurement of alumninum tubes by Iraq. It is not certain that such tubes have a non-nuclear use, and if they do, the burden of proof falls solely upon Iraq to conclusively prove that they are not being used in violation of UN disarmament resolutions.
