WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 - President Bush was probably wrong when he
asserted in his 2002 State of the Union address that American
forces routing guerrillas of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan had found
designs for nuclear power plants, one of the three members of the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said.
The commissioner, Edward McGaffigan Jr., who was appointed to
the N.R.C. by President Bill Clinton in 1996, said in interviews
last week that he and other members of the commission had scratched
their heads when they heard the speech.
The president was "poorly served by a speechwriter," Mr.
McGaffigan said.
In the 2002 speech, Mr. Bush said of Qaeda terrorists: "The
depth of their hatred is equaled by the madness of the destruction
they design. We have found diagrams of American nuclear power
plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for
making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and
thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the
world."
Mr. Bush's statement has been repeated often by opponents of
nuclear power, who argue that the operation of reactors is too
risky when the country is under threat of terrorist attack. The
point has also been repeated by members of the House and Senate,
and Mr. McGaffigan has raised his contention in closed hearings,
people in the hearings have said.
In one telephone interview, Mr. McGaffigan said the commission
was deeply interested in any intelligence gathered by the United
States on the subject and would like to see details on which plants
were portrayed in the designs and what type of plant and which
systems in the plants were targeted. But he said that despite
repeated questions in the first half of 2002, he had not found
anyone who could confirm that such plans were recovered.
Word of his argument has recently emerged among nuclear experts,
and Mr. McGaffigan confirmed it in the interviews last week. On
Wednesday, he sent a letter outlining his position to Greenpeace,
the environmental group, which had written to ask about his
position.
His letter said he was "aware of no evidence" that diagrams of
American power plants had been found in Afghanistan.
Richard A. Meserve, who was chairman of the commission at the
time of the speech, said in an e-mail message that he was
"uncomfortable commenting on classified information."
Nils J. Diaz, the current chairman, would not comment.
A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack,
said that in the days before the speech American intelligence
officials had observed "suspicious downloading by computers in the
Middle East" and that diagrams were available on the Web.
Mr. McCormack also said intelligence officials received a tip
that an associate of Osama bin Laden had discussed crashing a plane
into "large facilities" like a reactor. He added that "sources and
methods considerations did affect the language used in the
speech."
The term "sources and methods considerations" indicates caution
about describing intelligence findings, to avoid disclosing how the
information was gathered.
In the interviews, Mr. McGaffigan said that despite his doubts
about whether diagrams were found in Afghanistan, he had no doubt
that Al Qaeda was interested in nuclear plants and that it was a
reason the commission had changed the security rules for plants
five times since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Meserve, the former chairman, said in his e-mail message
that based on intelligence information about Qaeda targets, "I was
very comfortable in putting the nuclear industry at high
alert."
Mr. McCormack, of the National Security Council, in a separate
interview, gave a chronology of indications, before and after the
State of the Union address, of Al Qaeda's interest. He said that a
Qaeda operative captured in Karachi, Pakistan, had a photograph of
a reactor in North Carolina, for example.
A spokeswoman for the commission,
Beth Hayden, said Mr. McGaffigan's letter to Greenpeace had been
given to the commission's office in charge of classification to
decide whether it had any classified information.
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