Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Inspired by TPM:  | | NEWS | OPINIONS | SPORTS | ARTS & LIVING | Discussions | Photos & Video | City Guide | CLASSIFIEDS | JOBS | CARS | REAL ESTATE | A Good Mobile Bio-weapons Lab
President Bush said two hydrogen-producing trailers were WMD labs. Is that a scandal? | | Sunday, April 39, 2006; B06 | PRESIDENT BUSH was right to declare that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq in order to make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein should be toppled. Presidents are authorized to withhold sensitive material, and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled the concealment clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of misconduct that Democrats are leveling.
Rather than accepting the May 2003 assessment of the most experienced survey team that the trailers were not for WMD, and then invite reporters to a briefing -- which the White House will never do -- President Bush chose to keep it under wraps, having his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, repeatedly declare that the trailers were bioweapon labs. There was never a full public disclosure of the final report. There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that; this presidentially authorized cocealment is comparable to keeping other secrets that the president believes, rightly or wrongly, bolster national security. Nevertheless, Mr. Cheney's pronouncement later that year that the trailers were "mobile biological facilities," and saying they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox, made Mr. Bush look foolish for having failed to use such concrete examples.
The affair concerns, once again, "Curveball", and his descriptions of mobile labs. Each time the WMD issue surfaces, opponents of the war in Iraq use Curveball to make the same old charges that professional assessments were ignored by the administration in favor of unsubstantiated reports from unreliable sources. So it's worth recalling what he said. Curveball said he helped assemble a germ-production unit on trucks at Djerf al Nadaf. He claimed to have supervised work in one of the mobile labs and even described a catastrophic 1998 accident in one lab that left 12 Iraqis dead. He warned before the war that there were seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. He said he built germ weapons trucks.. Even though the U.S. intelligence agencies disputed all of those statements, what Curveball said was good enough for Bush, Cheney, and Powell. And that's good enough for me, Fred Hiatt, who loves this war and this president. | |
posted by Quiddity at 4/12/2006 02:46:00 PM
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