The Trailers Are Being Dusted Off Again by Bush Regime (In need of a change)

The Trailers Are Being Dusted Off Again by Bush Regime (In need of a change)

AP: Iraqi Trailers Are Re-Examined
Fri Oct 3, 8:16 AM ET


By DAFNA LINZER, Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20031003/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_the_evidence&cid=540&ncid=716

U.S. weapons hunters are re-examining the only discovery the Bush administration has cited as evidence of an illicit Iraqi weapons program — a pair of trailers the CIA (news - web sites) said were laboratories for making biological weapons, senior military officers involved in the hunt told The Associated Press.

Excerpts:

- "Although Bush administration officials continue to say publicly that the trailers were part of a biological weapons program, David Kay, the CIA representative charged with leading the weapons search in Iraq (news - web sites), acknowledged Thursday that those findings are "still very much being examined.""

- "In a paper issued May 28, the CIA called the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." But intelligence analysts from the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency have said they believe the trailers were probably used to fill hydrogen weather balloons."

- "One of the central arguments used by the CIA to support its initial findings is that one trailer had a fermenter. Smallpox, however, isn't grown with a fermenter and experts say it would be impossible to produce this specific virus in a trailer.

"There's no way that these particular labs could have been used to make smallpox," said Jonathan Tucker, a weapons expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies who authored "Scourge," a recent book on smallpox.

"Smallpox can only replicate inside cells, so you need a bioreactor, not a fermenter, which is a much more sophisticated piece of equipment."

In addition, he said, smallpox would need to be grown in a maximum containment laboratory, "not in a trailer with canvas siding. If there had been a leak, it would have spread smallpox all over the country.""

- "In his Feb. 5 presentation to the U.N. Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) used some of that intelligence to lay out the U.S. case for war. He displayed ARTISTS' CONCEPTIONS of mobile weapons facilities."

- "The original tip on the trailers was provided by a defector working with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and now a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council in Iraq."