Mark Dayton: “Over the weekend, there was a very alarming report in the New York Times that stated that senior administration…”

“Over the weekend, there was a very alarming report in the New York Times that stated that senior administration officials repeatedly failed to disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists about tubes that could be used for either a nuclear weapons program in Iraq or for alternative purposes, such as short-range rockets. I understand the article is printed in today's Record in Senator Byrd's remarks. The investigative article found: Senior administration officials . . . sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. That they had alternative uses. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public. The article goes on to say: The absence of unconventional weapons in Iraq is now widely seen as evidence of a profound intelligence failure, of an intelligence community blinded by 'group think,' false assumptions and unreliable human sources. Yet the tale of the tubes, pieced together through records and interviews with senior intelligence officers, nuclear experts, administration officials and Congressional investigators, reveals a different failure. Far from 'group think,' American nuclear and intelligence experts argued bitterly over the tubes.”