Secrets and Lies

Remember that Iraqi scientist who revealed that he had hidden unranium enrichment centrifuge equipment under a rosebush in his back yard? It was big news a month or so back when it was presented as the beginning of a flood of Iraqi scientists coming forward with mea culpa's and secret treasure maps to WMD nirvana. Wonder why you haven't heard more from that scientist? Now you know.

But for the Bush administration, things quickly began to go wrong with the Obeidi story. True, Obeidi said he’d buried the centrifuge equipment, as he’d been ordered to do in 1991 by Saddam’s son Qusay Hussein and son-in-law Hussein Kamel. But he also insisted to the CIA that, in effect, that was that: Saddam had never reconstituted his centrifuge program afterward, in large part because of the Iraqi tyrant’s fear of being discovered under the U.N. sanctions-and-inspections regime. If true, this was a terribly inconvenient fact for the Bush administration, after months in which Secretary of State Colin Powell and other senior officials had alleged that aluminum tubes imported from 11 countries were intended for just such a centrifuge program. Obeidi denied that and added that he would have known about any attempts to restart the program. He also told the CIA that, as the International Atomic Energy Agency and many technical experts have said, the aluminum tubes were intended for rockets, not uranium enrichment or a nuclear-weapons program. And he stuck by his story, despite persistent questioning by CIA investigators who still believed he was not telling the full truth.

He's currently being held incommunicado by the CIA in a Kuwaiti safe house. Safe, that is, from the press and uncomfortable questions.

[via Talking Points Memo]