Day: <span>March 27, 2003</span>

Seymour Hersh: “Why did the Administration endorse a forgery about Iraq?s nuclear program?”

Saying of evidence cited by George W. Bush in his speech issuing the ultamitum to Iraq which resulted in the war in which we’re currently engaged:

“Then the story fell apart. On March 7th, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents involving the Niger-Iraq uranium sale were fakes. ‘The I.A.E.A. has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents… are in fact not authentic,’ ElBaradei said.”

“One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, ‘These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.'”

Not war-related — an interesting article in Nature for people like me who are interested in number theory and chaos theory: Prime numbers not so random?

“Kumar’s team looked at the increments in the intervals between consecutive primes. For example, the intervals between the first few are 1, 2, 2, 4 and 2. The increments are the differences between these successive intervals: +1, 0, +2 and -2.

“These increments are not random, the physicists conclude: they have a rough-and-ready predictability. ‘Positive values are almost every time followed by corresponding negative values,’ explains team member Plamen Ivanov”