Part 1 of 7
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
— Attributed to Mark Twain
The rotor speed required to separate uranium isotopes doesn’t care who’s president, and when it comes to ascertaining the truth, neither do I.
In order to maintain such speeds, the material properties of centrifuges are as critical as it gets. You don’t need to interview a world-renowned nuclear scientist to figure that out — but I like to be thorough. To claim that Iraq WMD wasn’t a lie should be like saying we didn’t land on the moon. As I wrote and produced the most exhaustive documentary ever done on WMD, I would know:
As I said in my doc:
D.O.E.’s standard is to spin a tube at 20% above 90,000 RPM before failure — so 48,000 short is a pretty loose definition of ‘rough indication.’ Out of 31 tubes in subsequent testing, only one was successfully spun to 90,000 RPM for 65 minutes — which the C.I.A. seized on as evidence in their favor.
One D.O.E. analyst offered a superb analogy of that contorted conclusion: “Running your car up to 6,500 RPM briefly does not prove that you can run your car at 6,500 RPM cross country. It just doesn’t. Your car’s not going to make it.”
In an industry where fractions of a millimeter matter, these guys were playing horseshoes with centrifuge physics . . .
— Richard W. Memmer: Act II
When’s the last time you saw detail like that on this fiasco for the ages?
Who are “these guys”? Who are the “most experts” Powell was referring to in his UN speech? That’s the untold story I told 8 years ago when I wrote and produced the exhaustive documentary ever done on Iraq WMD. I had 50 pages on that issue in my unfinished book before I wrote one word of that script.
And yet when I went to interview a world-renowned nuclear scientist for my research, my journey had just begun.
By Design
America Remains Mired in the Murky
What does it say to you that on evidence claimed as components to build a nuclear bomb — the “debate” was hijacked by 10-second sound bites?
Shouldn’t any debate establish what the debate is actually about? What does it say about a country that can’t even establish that much on a matter of this magnitude?
As I said in my doc:
All the sarin gas shells in the world would have no bearing on the aluminum tubes and other intel, but loyalists to logical fallacies are not burdened by the inconvenience of FACT.
They will nitpick over pebbles while refusing to even glance at the mountain of evidence that crushes their “convictions.”
— Richard W. Memmer: Act V
For the sake of argument: Let’s say Saddam had full-blown active WMD programs on chemical & biological weapons. The tubes would still be a lie — whether the war would have been justified in that scenario or not. I’ll go one further: Let’s say he had a uranium enrichment program in operation as well, but that the rotors were carbon fiber — not aluminum.
Once again, the tubes would still be a lie.
Getting lucky in finding something you didn’t know about — does not absolve you from a case that was woven out of whole cloth.
The road to reality is blocked by detours designed to keep you going in circles. Purveyors of poppycock reroute you with narratives that avoid detail like Black Death. The way out is to start with an inconsistency or two that’s narrow in scope — and take the trail where it leads.
To ascertain the truth on any topic
If you’ve got something concrete to go on — that’s your point of entry. By all means, keep the door open in every direction. But by nailing down the definitive first, it paves a clearer path to all the rest.
This country does the exact opposite on everything — lumping it all together and never even approaching where you should have started in the first place:
This chart is misleading in several respects . . . Beams centrifuge never actually worked . . . We can infer . . .
Sounds pretty sloppy to me
Perhaps we should have a conversation to clear up what all this means on matters of world-altering consequence that have eroded reason beyond recognition?
The surgical specificity of this clip puts this lie in its place in 5 minutes alone.
Trillion Dollar Tube
Imagine what I did with 160
“There is no skimming over the surface of a subject with [Hamilton]. He must sink to the bottom to see what foundation it rests on.”
— Major William Pierce (Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton)
Wouldn’t it be absurd to share that quote if my clip contained nothing but trite talking points? Some circles are not burdened by squaring their walk with their talk. They seem to think that advertising virtue equates to embodying it.
In addition to interviewing world-renowned nuclear scientist, Dr. Houston Wood, I also corresponded with David Albright (the physicist above who wrote extensively on the tubes) — as well as Colin Powell’s chief of intelligence at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
Greg Thielmann said the following in 2013:
It will be up to Iraqis to debate whether their country now has a brighter future than it otherwise would have had without foreign invasion and occupation in the first decade of the new century. But it is uniquely incumbent on Americans to understand who and what were responsible for an enterprise that proved so costly in terms of U.S. lives lost, money spent, international reputation tarnished, and a campaign against al Qaeda diverted.
America just casually moved on
I didn’t — as I knew then what few know now:
The immeasurable value in the willingness to be wrong, understanding why, and looking to learn from it. And that not doing so — increasingly compounds the consequences of no accountability.
Look around
My writing revolves around how people allow emotion to run roughshod over reason when their interests are at stake.
When I returned from interviewing Dr. Houston Wood, the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict gave me a golden opportunity to illustrate exactly that. Debunking the WMD delusion & Trayvon tale is a conduit for showing how this nation systematically derails debate.
I needed a way to illustrate irrational behavior without showing any favoritism — and now I had it.
Unlike most of America
I don’t have situational rules
We’re well beyond “disagreement” in America — this is madness (countless millions miserably failing to follow even the most fundamental methods of how understanding works). I fail to understand how you think we can solve anything in a country that can’t even get the self-evident straight:
The second you shun evidence that doesn’t fit the narrative you want — you have contaminated your judgment. How quickly you come to your conclusions — and what you’re willing to ignore to solidify them:
That is the underlying message of my efforts.
3 minutes and 33 seconds into the Prologue — the parallel in the Profile Principle is revealed (an exemplary example of applying the same rules to both sides). On that issue of world-altering consequence, half the country took the word of professional know-it-alls over nuclear scientists. And therein lies the doc’s premise about expertise.
But rather spend even a few minutes digesting what someone’s saying, you gotta get back to broadcasting beliefs you just abandoned.
3 minutes and 33 seconds:
Ahhh . . .now I see where he’s going with this
Imagine!
There are powerful forces that make damn sure you don’t — and shows!
As I said in my doc:
At the heart of why we fail to live up to our potential as a society is because we excel at polluting even the purest form of fact. How can we possibly solve serious problems when we refuse to adhere to some semblance of the fundamentals of making sense?
— Richard W. Memmer: Epilogue
“Everybody believed Iraq had WMD” is not a valid argument any more than “armed only with Skittles.” By the way — how many of you know what Trayvon actually looked like? It’s not the kid on People magazine I assure you. I’m not interested in defending Zimmerman — my aim is to expose the irrational behavior of blindly defending Martin and the damage you did by doing so.
To conform to fact
We must agree that it was watermelon and consider what it means: Maybe nothing, maybe everything. But you pollute the debate when you won’t even acknowledge the irrefutable.
Worse than that — you poison your purpose:
On that front — and this one . . .
The Right wants the Left and the black community to get its act together on matters deeply woven into the fabric of America’s long history of brutality and disgrace: Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, murder, decades of civil rights violations, questionable shootings, and so on.
While the Right won’t even look at the material properties of a tube. What’s wrong with that picture — and this one?
Hmm, so the dimensions exactly match the tubes used in Iraq’s history of manufacturing the Nasser-81mm artillery rocket (a reverse-engineered version of the Italian Medusa)
Preach responsibility and take none
When your camp came up empty on WMD — you just bought more bullshit from the same people who sold you the first batch:
Shrewd!
I put the truth above all else . . .
And if at times the truth helps your interests and hurts mine, I’ll still stand by it. I love moments of truth and measurement that put my principles to the test. One of my favorites is the Florida election fiasco of 2000. I just wanted the right thing to be done — whether it served my interests or not was irrelevant. That sense of fairness is so foreign I might as well be speaking another language.
I learned early on in life that what you want gets in the way of what you see.
There’s a whole other story behind that line – but the same commitment to accuracy and integrity on that deal, drove the doc and everything else I do. I’m a programmer by profession. I’d never done any journalism before interviewing Dr. Wood, but I was striving for the best of what it’s supposed to be.
My Prime Directive
- No leading questions
- And if this man wants to talk — scrap the script and keep my mouth shut
Because of that — I obtained information that nobody else did. I wasn’t trying to tell a story that served me — I was trying to tell the story. And I’m the only one who told it in full:
One Voice Became Two 