Bush, Iraq, and WMD: new news same as the old news

Overview

Yesterday revealed even more news that the Bush administration knew before the Iraq war and the first few months after "Mission Accomplished" that there were no WMD in Iraq. In other words, George, Big Dick, Rumskull, Wolfowitless, and the rest of the gang basically lied--and knew they were lying.

This post will cover the latest news on the subject and set the stage for the next post, which will review (briefly) much of what has already been posted on this blog.

This topic is relevant today because most of these same idiots are now building a case against Iran just like they did against Iraq.

The "new" news: the mobile labs found in Iraq had nothing to do with WMD, and the Bush administration knew that before and after announcing to the world just the opposite.

Yesterday's Washington Post had an article by Joby Warrick entitled "Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War," which discussed a report that basically shows, in my opinion, that the Bush administration knew that the trailers found in Iraq after the war started were not "mobile labs" for producing biological weapons. The article does not state this conclusion, but rather says that there was substantial evidence that the trailers had no connection to biological weapons. Indeed, the article points out that both the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency issued a report claiming that the trailers were used to make biological weapons the day before Bush's first statements on the matter. That report said officials were "confident" that the trailers were mobile bio labs. However, as explained in the article,

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[.]

The date is significant because two days later Bush was in Poland for the annual G8 summit, and he gave an interview on Polish TV in which he made the following proclamation:

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two.

Now I know what some of you are thinking. Golly, that fact-finding report came in while Bush was out of the country preparing for an important conference of world leaders, so it's perfectly undestandable that he "did not get the memo." And all I am going to say to that is "Bullshit." But if anyone wants to stick with the argument, I will play along.

On June 5, 2003--nine days after the fact-finding field report was delivered--Bush gave a speech and said "We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents."

And Bush was definitely not alone is repeating this disingenuous garbage. Here's a sampling:

• Rumskull radio interview on May 29, 2003

We have teams of people that are out looking. They've investigated a number of sites. And within the last week or two, they have in fact captured and have in custody two of the mobile trailers that Secretary Powell talked about at the United Nations as being biological weapons laboratories. We have people who are telling that they worked in these vehicles. And they look at panels and say, "That was my work station in that panel, and that's what it's for."

• Wolfowitless interview in Australia on May 31, 2003

We have found those biological vans that the defector in Germany told us about. They seem to be exactly what he said they would be. And I would think that would pretty well corroborate the rest of his story which is they were for the production of biological weapons.

• Wolfowitless press briefing in Tokyo, June 3, 2003

We -- as the whole world knows -- have in fact found some significant evidence to confirm exactly what Secretary Powell said when he spoke to the United Nations about the development of mobile biological weapons production facilities that would seem to confirm fairly precisely the information we received from several defectors, one in particular who described the program in some detail.

NOTE: The defector mentioned by Wolfowitless was the infamous "Curveball," who 1) was provided by Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, 2) turned out to be lying, and 3) became the prime example that the INC had produced almost nothing other than bogus information. Oh, but that is another story...

• Colin Powell interview with the AP, June 12, 2003

When asked if the U.S.'s credibility had been damaged because no WMD had been found, Powell said,

I think our credibility is intact. I think that we will be able to demonstrate convincingly through the mobile labs, through documentation, through interviews, through what we find, that we knew what we were speaking about.

(emphasis added).

And then, as reported by the Washington Post, the field report was followed three weeks later (approx. June 17, 2003) by a 122-page final report. So if there was any excuse (and I say there was not) for the false statements already listed, there was no excuse whatsoever after June 17, 2003. And yet the bullshit just kept coming.

• Doug Feith, Remarks to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, July 7, 2003

Now in time, we’ll learn the truth about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. But given what we knew the Iraqi regime had and did -- for example, its use of poison gas against Iranians and Kurds, its program to deceive the U.N. inspectors, its cooperation with terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, and its failure to account for known WMD items, including the mobile biological weapons labs -- the danger of WMD in Saddam’s hands appeared grave.

(emphasis added).

• Big Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press," September 14, 2003

Same on biological weapons—we believe he’d developed the capacity to go mobile with his BW production capability because, again, in reaction to what we had done to him in ’91. We had intelligence reporting before the war that there were at least seven of these mobile labs that he had gone out and acquired. We’ve, since the war, found two of them. They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else you wanted to use during the course of developing the capacity for an attack.

(emphasis added).

NOTE: Except for the Cheney MTP quote, I found the above quotes via Billmon's Whiskey Bar and the TPM Muckraker.

Details on the fact-finding team and its findings

To understand why all of the foregoing quotes are bullshit, one needs to know more about the fact-finding team and its findings. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) put together a team of nine "scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons...each with at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills needed for bioweapons production."

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.

These interviews revealed that the the team of experts unequivocally concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with manufacturing biological weapons. As one expert said, "There was no connection to anything biological." But wait, there's more...

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."

Not only that, but the team of experts further concluded that the trailers could not be easily modified to produce biological weapons.

More reasons why the administration statements were bullshit

• The report of the Iraq Survey Group on September 30, 2004
  

The Washington Post article said in several places that those interviewed would not discuss details of their report because it was still classified, BUT they did say that the final unclassified report of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) from September 2004 reflected the same conclusions. This is significant for two reasons.

The first reason relates to the findings of the ISG. Those findings were discussed in Search for WMD is officially over. That post has a link to the ISG's report and explains that the linked document, though an interim report released on September 30, 2004, served as the final conclusions and findings of the ISG. This is particularly true as to the trailers. In March 2005, the ISG did issue an 84-page addenda to the September 30, 2004, report, but there was no mention of the trailers or "mobile labs." Indeed the Note issued along with the addenda said "ISG disproved much of the prewar reporting from a specific source concerning mobile BW capability[.]" Indeed, the ISG's Key Findings from September 30, 2004, said the following:

ISG thoroughly examined two trailers captured in 2003, suspected of being mobile BW agent production units, and investigated the associated evidence. ISG judges that its Iraqi makers almost certainly designed and built the equipment exclusively for the generation of hydrogen. It is impractical to use the equipment for the production and weaponization of BW agent. ISG judges that it cannot therefore be part of any BW program.

The rest of the ISG report on the trailers contains a detailed list of equipment which was 1) required to produce biological weapons, and 2) completely missing from the trailers. Again, remember that the fact-finding team's report over a year earlier came to these same conclusions. So, the Bush administration basically had this information--through the field report of May 27, 2003--and still publicly said that the trailers were biologigal weapons labs. Moreover, no public disclosure of the non-status of the trailers occurred until September 2004.

And that brings us to the second reason why the ISG's report is significant. The Washington Post article describes how members of the DIA fact-finding team felt that their report was simply shelved and ignored. Indeed, it seems to me that here is another case of the Bush administration manipulating the intelligence to suit its own decisions and needs. The administration was desperate to show some proof of WMD in May and June of 2003, and there was no way any report to the contrary was going to be tolerated.

Of course, this has been denied. A DIA spokesman had a creative denial:

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.

There is a grain of truth in this denial, but the rest of the story exposes the bullshit. David Kay, the former director of the ISG, told the Washington Post he was not informed of the fact-finding team's report until late 2003. Kay said, "If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq, I would certainly have given their findings more weight." And the world would have known much sooner that a team of bio weapons experts ruled out the possibility of the trailers being used for bio weapons production. And this leads us to another issue...

• The manipulation of intelligence

Anyone who wants to argue that the fact-finding team's field and final reports were not suppressed for political reasons is hampered at the least by extreme naivete. As I stated earlier, by the end of May 2003, the Bush administration was desperate to find any kind of WMD somewhere in Iraq. Hopes were very high that the trailers would be the "smoking gun" the Bush administration had guaranteed for over a year. Two teams of military experts, relying on the statements from Curveball, examined the trailers and concluded they were capable of producing bio weapons, but once independent people with actual expertise in making bio weapons examined the trailers, they definitively ruled out such use. My, how terribly inconvenient.

So what happened next? Well, according to the Washington Post,

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.

And now that it has appeared, the Bush administration is scrambling to minimize it. I can hear the excuses already:

• We didn't have time to know about the field report or the final report before we made all our statements.
• We relied on the CIA/DIA report, so it's not our fault.
• Other teams examined the trailers and said they were bio labs.

These excuses are bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Does anyone truly believe that the President, Vice President, and senior White House and DoD officials knew nothing about the fact-finding team's reports? If that actually happened, that is inexcusable incompetence and ignorance. If it didn't happen, then all those officials were basically lying. The CIA and DIA obviously knew about the fact-finding team's field report before their Report was released (the team was assembled by the DIA, after all), and they tried to get the team to change its conclusions for the final report. And yet, neither the CIA nor DIA ever said anything about the work of the fact-finding team. The "other teams" were not experts in the production of bio weapons, and their conclusions were based on the bullshit information from Curveball. I simply do not see any plausible explanation for the suppression of the fact-finding team's field and final reports other than political reasons. To anyone who disagrees, feel free to provide another explanation.