Remember those trailers, the Bushies went on and on about post-invasion? The ones that gave Stephen Hayes and The Weekly Standard kids such throbbing hard-ons? The mobile death labs filled with killer biological cocktails whipped up by villainous Iraqi scientists? Yeah?
They were for hydrogen balloons. As for what the president knew and when he knew it; he knew he was lying and he knew it two days before he lied to the American people. From WaPo:
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.
Unlike the portions of the National Intelligence Estimate which had to be declassified lest the American people be misled by devious opponents of the war, this report has not been declassified, distributed to ensure the public who is financing and fighting this war is able to conduct their deliberative democracy with the best available information. The administration declassifies to embarrass political opponents, not to better inform the citizenry they're supposed to serve.
Instead, Americans heard Colin Powell, months after the report's completion, assert that the government's "confidence level" about the labs was increasing. That was probably correct, as more and more bureaucrats forgot about the shelved document, they became more amenable to their own spin. And so it's no surprise that, come September, America saw Dick Cheney declare the trailers "mobile biological facilities" that could have been used for anthrax or smallpox. What they didn't hear was this:
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.
Some politicized desk jockey in DC was heeded over nine experts each with a decade plus of experience in a relevant area. He was listened to because his judgments squared with that of "Curveball," the Iraqi defector who claimed to be a chemical weapons engineer, turned out to be a liar, and appears to have singlehandedly concocted around 50% of our case for war. Impressive work, considering his code name, basically, means betrayal. How cunningly Shakespearian of him.
As for George Tenet's' later assertion that the labs could have been "easily modified" to create biological weapons, that too was a vicious lie. "It would have been easier to start all over with a bucket," said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and member of the Iraq survey group. Of course, this administration prefers not to lie, they're fond of the plausible mislead. So they asked the experts to lend a brotha a hand:
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.[...]
"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."
Not anymore. This is big, and coming at precisely the wrong time for the administration. They've declassified incorrect reports to kneecap the case against war, ignored classified documents that discredit their own rhetoric, and now Americans are trapped in an imploding war that they accepted on false premises. The danger for the Bushies is that at exactly the moment voters are searching for a reason to turn against a conflict they nominally supported, they're being given both a reason and villains who purposefully tricked them into ignoring their better judgment. Revelations about the administration's actions are lifting culpability from the American people, and once they lose their investment in this conflict, the crew sullying the White House is finished.
