DOUBTS ON IRAQI BIOTRAILERS

“American and British intel­li­gence ana­lysts with direct access to the evi­dence are dis­put­ing claims that the mys­te­ri­ous trail­ers found in Iraq were for mak­ing deadly germs,” reports the New York Times’ Judith Miller and William Broad. “In inter­views over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other pur­poses and charged that the eval­u­a­tion process had been dam­aged by a rush to judg­ment.”

“Everyone has wanted to find the ‘smok­ing gun’ so much that they may have wanted to have reached this con­clu­sion,” said one intel­li­gence expert who has seen the trail­ers and, like some oth­ers, spoke on con­di­tion that he not be iden­ti­fied. He added, “I am very upset with the process.“
The Bush admin­is­tra­tion has said the two trail­ers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, are evi­dence that Saddam Hussein was hid­ing a pro­gram for bio­log­i­cal war­fare. In a white paper last week, it pub­licly detailed its case, even while con­ced­ing dis­crep­an­cies in the evi­dence and a lack of hard proof.
Now, intel­li­gence ana­lysts sta­tioned in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are dis­clos­ing seri­ous doubts about the administration’s con­clu­sions in what appears to be a bit­ter debate within the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. Skeptics said their ini­tial judg­ments of a weapon appli­ca­tion for the trail­ers had fal­tered as new evi­dence came to light. 

This story is sig­nif­i­cant both for what it says, and for who is say­ing it. For months, Miller has been the media’s lead cheer­leader on Iraq’s WMD pro­grams. Under a highly unusual arrange­ment with the U.S. mil­i­tary, which gets to vet her sto­ries, she’s passed along rumors fed to her by Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi. Miller’s sto­ries are still get­ting the mil­i­tary once-​​over. But now, she has new sources — ones in American and British intel­li­gence.
THERE’S MORE: “In (a) report last September, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it could find no reli­able infor­ma­tion to indi­cate that Iraq had any chem­i­cal weapons avail­able for use on the bat­tle­field. But the agency also said Iraq prob­a­bly had stock­piles of banned chem­i­cal war­fare agents,” accord­ing to the Associated Press.
AND MORE: In a sep­a­rate arti­cle, the AP says, “The Bush admin­is­tra­tion dis­torted intel­li­gence and pre­sented con­jec­ture as evi­dence to jus­tify a U.S. inva­sion of Iraq, accord­ing to a retired intel­li­gence offi­cial who served dur­ing the months before the war.“
AND MORE: One Defense Tech reader — who works in mil­i­tary intel­li­gence — thinks that the story above is disin­gen­u­ous.
“You can usu­ally always find one ana­lyst who will dis­agree with offi­cial and pub­lished ana­lyt­i­cal reports,” he writes. “It both­ers me that the media seems to be search­ing out those dis­senters and pre­sent­ing them as a ‘Gotcha’, which leads me to believe that per­haps they have an agenda at work (i.e. Making Bush look bad).“
Even the “retired intel­li­gence offi­cial” quoted in the arti­cle “thought there were WMD to be wor­ried about,” he notes.

Thielmann said he had pre­sumed Iraq had sup­plies of chem­i­cal and prob­a­bly bio­log­i­cal weapons. He par­tic­u­larly expected U.S. forces to find caches of mus­tard agent or other chem­i­cal weapons left over from Saddam’s old stock­piles.
“We appear to have been wrong,” he said. “I’ve been gen­uinely sur­prised at that.”

AND MORE: The Guardian breaks down the rea­sons why these trail­ers, at least, weren’t for biowar.

June 8th, 2003 | Chem-Bio | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.