Mobile Bioweapons Lab and Other White House Fabrications
When I first started hearing the details of the mobile bioweapons labs that Iraq was supposed to have, I immediately thought of one of those bad science fiction movies from the 1950s that are too implausible to take seriously. It was hard for me not to be skeptical; move a trailer or mobile home a few times and they're not going to be airtight; go around a curve too fast during one of Iraq's wind storms, and you lose a village, a town or a city (NASA is the expert on airtight vehicles and they still include repair kits on space missions).
In retrospect, I suspect the case for war in the late summer of 2002 was basically a bad bluff; Bush used the bluff to get a UN resolution that demanded Iraq let the UN inspectors return. It was expected that when Saddam Hussein said no to the inspections, the war would then have its justification. But the administration apparently did not expect Saddam Hussein to say yes to the inspections. This is the point where a legitimate foreign policy would have required a president to reassess the assumptions and evidence for war. As far as we know, no such reassessment ever took place. For whatever reason, the decision for war had been made months earlier but the administration in early 2003 was still faced with the task of justifying the war to the American public and to potential allies. Of course, we now know that evidence for such a war did not exist. In fact, the phony evidence that had already been trotted out by the administration was in danger of falling apart; the aluminum tubes story, for example, was being challenged. More evidence was needed, real or not.
Although it was known that the mobile bioweapons labs story was a fiction, it had the advantage of helping to explain why the UN was not finding any conventional bioweapons labs after they were allowed to return to Iraq. Actually, the case for war by the time Colin Powell presented it at the UN in February of 2003 was thin, so thin that Colin Powell said at the time not to expect much.
The sad truth is that the more we learn, the more Colin Powell needs to explain, despite his regrets about his UN presentation. No one in the administration at the time had more credibility than Colin Powell. He owes the American people a lengthy explanation; the oath he has taken a number of times requires it.
Joby Warrick of The Washington Post has the latest on the Iraqi defector Curveball and the fictional bioweapons labs:
In retrospect, I suspect the case for war in the late summer of 2002 was basically a bad bluff; Bush used the bluff to get a UN resolution that demanded Iraq let the UN inspectors return. It was expected that when Saddam Hussein said no to the inspections, the war would then have its justification. But the administration apparently did not expect Saddam Hussein to say yes to the inspections. This is the point where a legitimate foreign policy would have required a president to reassess the assumptions and evidence for war. As far as we know, no such reassessment ever took place. For whatever reason, the decision for war had been made months earlier but the administration in early 2003 was still faced with the task of justifying the war to the American public and to potential allies. Of course, we now know that evidence for such a war did not exist. In fact, the phony evidence that had already been trotted out by the administration was in danger of falling apart; the aluminum tubes story, for example, was being challenged. More evidence was needed, real or not.
Although it was known that the mobile bioweapons labs story was a fiction, it had the advantage of helping to explain why the UN was not finding any conventional bioweapons labs after they were allowed to return to Iraq. Actually, the case for war by the time Colin Powell presented it at the UN in February of 2003 was thin, so thin that Colin Powell said at the time not to expect much.
The sad truth is that the more we learn, the more Colin Powell needs to explain, despite his regrets about his UN presentation. No one in the administration at the time had more credibility than Colin Powell. He owes the American people a lengthy explanation; the oath he has taken a number of times requires it.
Joby Warrick of The Washington Post has the latest on the Iraqi defector Curveball and the fictional bioweapons labs:
In late January 2003, as Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to argue the Bush administration's case against Iraq at the United Nations, veteran CIA officer Tyler Drumheller sat down with a classified draft of Powell's speech to look for errors. He found a whopper: a claim about mobile biological labs built by Iraq for germ warfare.Of course, these weren't intelligence failures. These were cherry-picked intelligence items that had already been dismissed and then resurrected by those in the administration determined on war. For the most part, the CIA did its job. And that was the very thing the White House did not want.
Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.
A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."
The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.
"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."
While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found.
posted by Craig at 11:22 PM
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