Persistent falsehoods about bioweapons labs in Iraq and consent for war

Deep Blade Journal since its first year has traced this story


Secret, contemporaneous report within the Pentagon itself debunked the notion that this laughable trailer meant in the dubious remarks of President Bush on Polish television (May 29, 2003) that, ``We found the weapons of mass destruction.''

The hand-picked weapons inspector President Bush sent to Iraq in the spring of 2003, David Kay, later would say, ``This is the one that's damning.''

He was talking about phony defector Curveball's story on mobile bioweapons labs and how it was used to stir up support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. These units supposedly were one in the same with those famously projected in the UN slide show by then Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 5, 2003. The media had cooperated with the propaganda effort by uncritically hyping the story for months during fall 2002 and winter 2003 with tales of Saddam's ``Hell on Wheels'' and ``Winnebagos of Death.''

After the president's ``mission accomplished'' events in May 2003, a widely-released story on May 7, 2003 read,

The Pentagon said Wednesday it may have recovered an Iraqi mobile biological weapons lab, the first such announcement since the start of the war to disarm the government of President Saddam Hussein.

American forces in Iraq are doing tests on a trailer that matches the description of such laboratories, given by various sources including a defector who says he helped operate one, Defense Department officials said.

"On the smoking gun, I don't know," Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone said when asked whether this was a breakthrough in the coalition search for weapons of mass destruction.

Cambone also announced that some 2,100 people will be sent to Iraq to augment the weapons hunt as well as the search for information on government leaders, terrorists, war crimes, atrocities and Iraqi prisoners of war. The effort will be headed by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Cambone said.

He said initial tests have been done on a trailer truck taken into custody April 19 at a Kurdish checkpoint in northern Iraq. It is painted in a military color scheme, was found on a transporter normally used for tanks and — as an Iraqi defector has described Iraq's mobile labs — contains a fermenter and a system to capture exhaust gases, he said.

"While some of the equipment on the trailer could have been used for purposes other than biological weapons agent production, U.S. and U.K. technical experts have concluded that the unit does not appear to perform any function beyond what the defector said it was for, which is the production of biological agents," Cambone said...

Later that month, a breathless CIA document describing the trailers using graphics similar to Powell's (still here on the internet!) purported to show the ``strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program.''

Evidently this juiced-up story and document, totally at odds with what the Pentagon in secret was finding out about the trailers for itself, was designed to feed a remarkable post-war propaganda effort claiming WMD were found. Read the cited Deep Blade post for more detail and extensive analysis.

For those needing more proof that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other officials had a predilection for hyping false WMD stories while secret internal reports to the contrary were available, the Washington Post today revealed that,

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The contents of the final report, ``Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers,'' remain classified. But interviews reveal that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. Those interviewed took care not to discuss the classified portions of their work.

``There was no connection to anything biological,'' said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: ``the biggest sand toilets in the world.''

This internal assessment confirms what has been on the record for a long time. Shortly after the Bush remarks on Polish TV, a June 15, 2003 story in The Observer reported that a British team who had examined the trailers determined

They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.

The June 2004 Deep Blade post referenced above traces many more months of promotion of the bioweapons falsehoods. The last liar standing apparently was Dick Cheney, who claimed in January 2004 that the trailers meant there was ``conclusive evidence, if you will, that he [Saddam] did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction.''

Obviously to me, all of this shows a persistent, intentional trail of falsehoods released by the Bush administration to the public -- both pre-war and post-war -- in order to maintain consent for the aggression.