The recent article by Murray Waas has gotten a lot of buzz recently, but misses a crucial point about the uranium tubes hoax.  Waas reported that a summary of the NIE which called the uranium tube story into question made it all the way up to President Bush, proving that he should have waived off the claim:

Hadley was particularly concerned that the public might learn of a classified one-page summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, specifically written for Bush in October 2002.  The summary said that although "most agencies judge" that the aluminum tubes were "related to a uranium enrichment effort," the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Energy Department's intelligence branch "believe that the tubes more likely are intended for conventional weapons."   

http://news.nationaljournal.com/articles/0330nj1.htm

 

What Waas didn’t mention was that the State Department and Energy Department didn’t just believe that the tubes were meant for conventional weapons, they proved it.  As 60 Minutes reported in 2004:

[Greg] Thielmann was a foreign service officer for 25 years.  His last job at the State Department was acting director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs, which was responsible for analyzing the Iraqi weapons threat.                                                                                                                                                             

He and his staff had the highest security clearances, and saw virtually everything – whether it came into the CIA or the Defense Department.                                                                       

[Snip]                                                                                                                                       

Intelligence agents intercepted the tubes in 2001, and the CIA said they were parts for a centrifuge to enrich uranium -- fuel for an atom bomb. But Thielmann wasn’t so sure.              

Experts at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the scientists who enriched uranium for American bombs, advised that the tubes were all wrong for a bomb program.  At about the same time, Thielmann’s office was working on another explanation. It turned out the tubes' dimensions perfectly matched an Iraqi conventional rocket.                                                                         

“The aluminum was exactly, I think, what the Iraqis wanted for artillery,” recalls Thielmann, who says he sent that word up to the Secretary of State months before.                                     

Houston Wood was a consultant who worked on the Oak Ridge analysis of the tubes. He watched Powell’s speech, too.                                                                                                         

“I guess I was angry, that’s the best way to describe my emotions. I was angry at that,” says Wood, who is among the world’s authorities on uranium enrichment by centrifuge. He found the tubes couldn’t be what the CIA thought they were.  They were too heavy, three times too thick and certain to leak.                  

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/14/60II/main577975.shtml

 

From the story above, it appears that there is documentary proof that the specifications in the uranium tube reports matched previous intelligence reports.  I hope some enterprising journalist out there is working with Thielmann to file a few FOI requests and make those reports public.  Could be the most damning proof yet that Bush lied, and people died.