The Bush administration publicly
asserted that two trailers captured by U.S. troops in Iraq in
May 2003 were mobile "biological laboratories" even after U.S.
intelligence officials had evidence that it was not true, The
Washington Post reported on Wednesday.
On May 29, 2003, President George W. Bush hailed the
capture of the trailers, declaring "We have found the weapons
of mass destruction."
But a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission had already
concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological
weapons, the Post reported, citing government officials and
weapons experts who participated in the secret mission or had
direct knowledge of it.
The Post said the group's unanimous findings had been sent
to the Pentagon in a field report, two days before the
president's statement.
Bush cited the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction
as the prime justification for invading Iraq. No such weapons
ever were found.
A U.S. intelligence official, speaking to Reuters on
condition of anonymity confirmed the existence of the field
report but said it was a preliminary finding that had to be
evaluated.
"You don't change a report that has been coordinated in the
(intelligence) community based on a field report," the official
said. "It's a preliminary report. No matter how strongly the
individual may feel about the subject matter."
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report
three weeks later were classified and shelved, The Washington
Post reported. It added that for nearly a year after that, the
Bush administration continued to public assert that the
trailers were biological weapons factories.
The authors of the reports -- nine U.S. and British
civilian experts -- were sent to Baghdad by the Defense
Intelligence Agency, or DIA, the newspaper said.
A DIA spokesman told the paper 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.
The team's work remains classified. But the newspaper said
interviews revealed that the team was unequivocal in its
conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture
biological weapons.
"There was no connection to anything biological," one
expert who studied the trailers was quoted as saying.
Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited
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