The WMD's are on boats. I asssume your comment to this group is how do we
get WMD's out of boats (those pesky things are hard to fnd . . the bilge,
the galley, they are everywhaere including Kays head!)


"Harry Krause" wrote in message
news:c3dhc2g=.572e99c95b339ac83c53afd092345147@107 5405570.nulluser.com...
From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1/29/04:
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/o...man/index.html

No mystery to untangling WMD puzzler

By Jay Bookman


How could U.S. officials have been so wrong about something so
important -- the stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that
we now know never existed?

The Case of the Two Trailers may hold the answer.

You may recall that when two oddly equipped flatbed trailers were
found in northern Iraq last spring, U.S. officials jumped to claim
them as mobile labs used to make anthrax and other weapons.

"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological
laboratories," President Bush boasted at the time.

"And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we
haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons,
they're wrong, we found them."

In reality, it was the president who was wrong.

As retiring chief weapons inspector David Kay admitted last week, the
trailers that we flaunted before the world to justify our invasion
have turned out to be harmless facilities that produced hydrogen to
fill weather balloons.

How could we make such an embarrassing mistake?

Well, the initial claim that Iraq possessed mobile weapons labs came
from the same source as so much of our faulty intelligence:

Iraqi defectors, a group with a long history of telling us whoppers
about highly advanced nuclear programs, smallpox research -- anything
that might goad us into invading.

The CIA knew all too well that such sources were often tainted, yet it
went ahead and cited the mobile labs as fact, with no physical
evidence to corroborate the claim.

Why?

Without a thorough investigation, we have only conjecture.

But mobile labs did serve a convenient purpose for U.S. policy-makers,
who were scrambling to explain why U.N. inspectors weren't finding
anything in Iraq.

"We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile, biological
agent factories," Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United
Nations in February.

"The truck-mounted ones have at least two or three trucks each. That
means that the mobile production facilities are very few, perhaps 18
trucks that we know of. There may be more. . . . Just imagine trying
to find 18 trucks among the thousands and thousands of trucks that
travel the roads of Iraq every single day."

Now skip ahead a few months to the discovery of the two trailers.

Here another glaring weakness in U.S. intelligence comes into play.

We did not investigate to see what the trailers were; we investigated
to prove that they were weapons labs.

In other words, the conclusion was preordained.

Kay, who was a strong supporter of the war, offers a compelling
example of that blindness at work.

Last May, before his appointment to head the U.S. weapons search, he
was working as an expert analyst for NBC News and was given the chance
to inspect one of the trailers firsthand.

He immediately proclaimed them proof that Saddam Hussein had been
producing biological weapons.

"Literally, there's nothing else you would do this way on a mobile
facility," Kay told the world.

He also rejected the suggestion that the trailers might have been
simple hydrogen facilities, claiming that it "didn't pass the laugh
test."

Inevitably, a lack of trust and coordination among U.S. agencies also
plays a role, as it has throughout this episode.

In late May, the CIA released a "white paper" admitting that it had no
evidence that the trailers were used to create germ weapons.

"We nevertheless are confident that this trailer is a mobile BW
[bioweapons] production plant," the agency said.

The CIA reached that conclusion without consulting the State
Department's intelligence bureau, and a few days later, State
concluded that the CIA report had little basis in fact.

That leads to one more question:

Why did CIA professionals release a white paper on the trailers
prematurely, a paper that even to laymen seemed to ignore conflicting
evidence and distort the available data?

Well, they were responding to a request from the White House, which at
the time needed help in fending off doubts about our failure to find
WMD.

That gives us the final piece of the puzzle:

Intelligence was corrupted for political purposes, not just in the
Case of the Two Trailers, but in almost every aspect of our
intelligence effort.