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U.S. Official Concedes That Bush Erred in Claiming Nuclear Plant Threat
A member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said U.S. President George W. Bush was probably wrong when he said in his 2002 State of the Union address that U.S. forces in Afghanistan had found nuclear power plant designs at al-Qaeda bases, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, Jan. 30, 2002). NRC Commissioner Edward McGaffigan said in interviews that the commission was interested in any U.S. intelligence gathered on the topic of possible terrorist attacks on U.S. nuclear power plants and would be interested in learning what types of plants were depicted in the recovered designs. He also said, though, that he could find no one who could confirm that such designs had been recovered. Last week, McGaffigan sent a letter to Greenpeace in response to a question about his position on Bush’s claim. In his letter, McGaffigan said he was “aware of no evidence” that U.S. nuclear power plant designs had been found in Afghanistan (Matthew Wald, New York Times, Feb. 10). Last night, a senior Bush administration official said no plant designs had been found in Afghanistan, according to the Wall Street Journal. “There’s no additional basis for the language in the speech that we have found,” the official said. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said last night that Bush’s State of the Union claim, while not based on actual plant designs found in Afghanistan, was based on other U.S. intelligence information, such as suggestions made by a suspected al-Qaeda operative in 2001 and 2002 of targeting nuclear power plants (Block/Hitt, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 10).
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