The Iraqi aluminium tubes

The dissent existed from the beginning, inside the government, from the people best placed to judge.

The Department of Energy — which runs the American enrichment laboratories and therefore knows what a centrifuge rotor looks like — assessed that the tubes were poorly suited to centrifuge use and were consistent with the 81mm Nasser rocket, which Iraq manufactured and for which it had previously imported near-identical tubes. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research reached the same conclusion. The tubes' dimensions, wall thickness and anodised coating matched the rocket, and the coating in particular is unhelpful in a centrifuge.

Those dissents were recorded in the National Intelligence Estimate, in annexes and footnotes. They were not present in the public case. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's 2004 report found the intelligence community's judgement on the tubes to be unsupported by the evidence, and the 2005 Robb–Silberman Commission examined how a contested technical assessment came to be stated publicly as settled.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, under Mohamed ElBaradei, examined the tubes in Iraq before the invasion and reported to the Security Council in January and March 2003 that they were not suitable for centrifuges and were consistent with the rocket programme. That assessment was made in public, before the war, and was dismissed at the time.

After the invasion the Iraq Survey Group found no centrifuge programme. The tubes were for rockets.

This entry is DEBUNKED because the nuclear claim was false. The documented concealment — a real dissent, in writing, absent from the public case — sits inside it rather than replacing it, and is why the entry is here at all.