The Senate Intelligence Committee’s July 9, 2004 report of the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) published in October 2002, said the aluminum tubes Iraq allegedly tried to buy from China were “cited as evidence of Iraq’s determination to build nuclear weapons. …The Department of Energy in particular argued in great detail that the tubes were all wrong for uranium enrichment. …The CIA ignored these doubts, sought ‘expert’ advice backing the centrifuge interpretation from outside contractors who did not know enough to disagree, exaggerated the cost of the tubes, accepted a single flimsy claim that Saddam was ‘closely following’ the tube purchase, falsely claimed that ‘almost every country’ approached by Iraq to build the tubes said the tolerance specifications were too high, and while citing a DOE-INR [Department of Energy-Bureau of Intelligence and Research] ‘footnote’ of disagreement in the text of the NIE, put the actual text of the footnote sixty pages deeper into the paper. The committee’s report faults the CIA in every one of its twenty conclusions about analysis of Iraq’s nuclear program. It builds an argument for finding that the agency’s crafting and shaping of the NIE can only be described as an attempt to manufacture a case justifying war.”
– Thomas Powers, The Military Error, Pages 27-28