Jerry writes:
> On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 22:00:03 -0500, Denys Beauchemin
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraqi_mobile_plants/paper_w.pdf
>
> The CIA no longer stands by that 2003 report
>
> The comprehensive 2004 report is different:
>
> http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/chap5.html
Even more importantly, the CIA knew in 2003 that the "mobile biological
laboratories" weren't that and either covered up that fact or did nothing to
contradict Bush and Cheney's claims. Indeed, Cheney was still claiming on the "Meet
the Press" four months later that they had found the mobile biological labs
even though he knew it wasn't true.
The following is an article from yesterday's Washington Post:
========================================
Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi
Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 12, 2006; A01
On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed
a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured
by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological
laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was
hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as
Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it
was not true.
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 three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later
were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration
and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were
weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts --
scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields
involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense
Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings
were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six
government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct
knowledge of it.
None would consent to being identified by name because of fear that their
jobs would be jeopardized. Their accounts were verified by other current and
former government officials knowledgeable about the mission. 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."
Primary Piece of Evidence
The story of the technical team and its reports adds a new dimension to the
debate over the U.S. government's handling of intelligence related to banned
Iraqi weapons programs. The trailers -- along with aluminum tubes acquired by
Iraq for what was claimed to be a nuclear weapons program -- were primary pieces
of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its
contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.
Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied allegations
that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But officials familiar with the technical team's
reports are questioning anew whether intelligence agencies played down or
dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the administration's public views
about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Last year, a presidential commission on
intelligence failures criticized U.S. spy agencies for discounting evidence
that contradicted the official line about banned weapons in Iraq, both before
and after the invasion.
Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency declined to comment
on the specific findings of the technical report because it remains
classified. A spokesman for the DIA asserted that the team's findings were neither
ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey
Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The
survey group's final report in September 2004 -- 15 months after the technical
report was written -- said the trailers were "impractical" for biological
weapons production and were "almost certainly intended" for manufacturing hydrogen
for weather balloons.
"Whether the information was offered to others in the political realm I
cannot say," said the DIA official, who spoke on the condition that he not be
identified.
Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers
noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the
suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of
military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that
the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of
intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated,
and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior
official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
The technical team's findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence
agencies' public statements on the trailers. A day after the team's report was
transmitted to Washington -- May 28, 2003 -- the CIA publicly released its first
formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the views of its Washington
analysts. That white paper, which also bore the DIA seal, contended that U.S.
officials were "confident" that the trailers were used for "mobile biological
weapons production."
Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply "mobile
biological laboratories" in speeches and press statements by administration
officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that the
"confidence level is increasing" that the trailers were intended for biowarfare.
In September, Vice President Cheney pronounced the trailers to be "mobile
biological facilities," and said they could have been used to produce anthrax or
smallpox.
By autumn, leaders of the Iraqi Survey Group were publicly expressing doubts
about the trailers in news reports. David Kay, the group's first leader, told
Congress on Oct. 2 that he had found no banned weapons in Iraq and was unable
to verify the claim that the disputed trailers were weapons labs. Still, as
late as February 2004, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet continued to assert
that the mobile-labs theory remained plausible. Although there was "no consensus"
among intelligence officials, the trailers "could be made to work" as weapons
labs, he said in a speech Feb. 5.
Tenet, now a faculty member at Georgetown's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign
Service, declined to comment for this story.
Kay, in an interview, said senior CIA officials had advised him upon
accepting the survey group's leadership in June 2003 that some experts in the DIA were
"backsliding" on whether the trailers were weapons labs. But Kay said he was
not apprised of the technical team's findings until late 2003, near the end of
his time as the group's leader.
"If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq," Kay said, "I would
certainly have given their findings more weight."
A Defector's Tales
Even before the trailers were seized in spring 2003, the mobile labs had
achieved mythic stature. As early as the mid-1990s, weapons inspectors from the
United Nations chased phantom mobile labs that were said to be mounted on trucks
or rail cars, churning out tons of anthrax by night and moving to new
locations each day. No such labs were found, but many officials believed the stories,
thanks in large part to elaborate tales told by Iraqi defectors.
The CIA's star informant, an Iraqi with the code name Curveball, was a
self-proclaimed chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999 and requested
asylum. For four years, the Baghdad native passed secrets about alleged Iraqi
banned weapons to the CIA indirectly, through Germany's intelligence service.
Curveball provided descriptions of mobile labs and said he had supervised work in
one of them. He even described a catastrophic 1998 accident in one lab that
left 12 Iraqis dead.
Curveball's detailed descriptions -- which were officially discredited in
2004 -- helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later
used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N.
Security Council.
"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and
on rails," Powell said in the Feb. 5, 2003, speech. Thanks to those
descriptions, he said, "We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks,
pumps, compressors and other parts look like."
The trailers discovered in the Iraqi desert resembled the drawings well
enough, at least from a distance. One of them, a flatbed trailer covered by tarps,
was found in April by Kurdish fighters near the northern city of Irbil. The
second was captured by U.S. forces near Mosul. Both were painted military green
and outfitted with a suspicious array of gear: large metal tanks, motors,
compressors, pipes and valves.
Photos of the trailers were quickly circulated, and many weapons experts were
convinced that the long-sought mobile labs had been found.
Yet reaction from Iraqi sources was troublingly inconsistent. Curveball,
shown photos of the trailers, confirmed they were mobile labs and even pointed out
key features. But other Iraqi informants in internal reports disputed
Curveball's story and claimed the trailers had a benign purpose: producing hydrogen
for weather balloons.
Back at the Pentagon, DIA officials attempted a quick resolution of the
dispute. The task fell to the "Jefferson Project," a DIA-led initiative made up of
government and civilian technical experts who specialize in analyzing and
countering biological threats. Project leaders put together a team of volunteers,
eight Americans and a Briton, each with at least a decade of experience in one
of the essential technical skills needed for bioweapons production. All were
nongovernment employees working for defense contractors or the Energy
Department's national labs.
The technical team was assembled in Kuwait and then flown to Baghdad to begin
their work early on May 25, 2003. By that date, the two trailers had been
moved to a military base on the grounds of one of deposed president Saddam
Hussein's Baghdad palaces. When members of the technical team arrived, they found
the trailers parked in an open lot, covered with camouflage netting.
The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree
temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped
gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and
reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge
tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.
By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about
what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.
"Within the first four hours," said one team member, who like the others
spoke on the condition he not be named, "it was clear to everyone that these were
not biological labs."
News of the team's early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of
the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and
phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications.
The reason for the nervousness was soon obvious: In Washington, a CIA analyst
had written a draft white paper on the trailers, an official assessment that
would also reflect the views of the DIA. The white paper described the
trailers as "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare
program." It also explicitly rejected an explanation by Iraqi officials,
described in a New York Times article a few days earlier, that the trailers might
be mobile units for producing hydrogen.
But the technical team's preliminary report, written in a tent in Baghdad and
approved by each team member, reached a conclusion opposite from that of the
white paper.
Key Components Lacking
Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission declined
to discuss technical details of the team's findings because the report remains
classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group's nonclassified, final
report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting the same conclusions.
That report said the trailers were "impractical for biological agent
production," lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons.
Instead, the trailers were "almost certainly designed and built for the generation
of hydrogen," the survey group reported.
The group's report and members of the technical team also dismissed the
notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.
"It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket," said Rod Barton,
an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the survey group.
The technical team's preliminary report was transmitted in the early hours of
May 27, just before its members began boarding planes to return home. Within
24 hours, the CIA published its white paper, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare
Agent Production Plants," on its Web site.
After team members returned to Washington, they began work on a final report.
At several points, members were questioned about revising their conclusions,
according to sources knowledgeable about the conversations. The questioners
generally wanted to know the same thing: Could the report's conclusions be
softened, to leave open a possibility that the trailers might have been intended
for weapons?
In the end, the final report -- 19 pages plus a 103-page appendix -- remained
unequivocal in declaring the trailers unsuitable for weapons production.
"It was very assertive," said one weapons expert familiar with the report's
contents.
Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs and
watched as their work appeared to vanish.
"I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated,"
one member recalled. "It never happened. And I just had to live with it."
Researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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