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Audacity of Truth
Whiner-in-Chief:
"[W]hether the grumbling is about Republicans on Fox or bloggers in pajamas, there's a word for what the president and his aides are doing. That word is "whining." And nothing [...] does more damage to Obama's credibility or authority than the sense that a popular president is becoming the whiner-in-chief."
- John Nichols, Nation Magazine - 10/12/09
The case of the WaPo whopper
Prepare yourself this morning for a fresh deluge of postings and assertions from the anti-war left who are screaming once again “BUSH LIED!!!!!!!!!!!” after referencing the following Washington Post article, the headline of which reads:
Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War
Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary
The first few paragraphs of the four page story tell us:
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.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts — scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons — who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers. Their actions and findings were described to a Washington Post reporter in interviews with six government officials and weapons experts who participated in the mission or had direct knowledge of it.
Bush lied!!!!!! Right? Wrong. If you continue on reading the piece, you’ll note the following:
Spokesmen for the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency declined to comment on the specific findings of the technical report because it remains classified. A spokesman for the DIA asserted 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 survey group’s final report in September 2004 — 15 months after the technical report was written — said the trailers were “impractical” for biological weapons production and were “almost certainly intended” for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons. “Whether the information was offered to others in the political realm I cannot say” said the DIA official, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. “It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides” said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
The technical team’s findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence agencies’ public statements on the trailers. A day after the team’s report was transmitted to Washington — May 28, 2003 — the CIA publicly released its first formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the views of its Washington analysts. That white paper, which also bore the DIA seal, contended that U.S. officials were “confident” that the trailers were used for “mobile biological weapons production.”
I conclude that the headline and the opening paragraphs are willful misrepresentations of the facts as reported by the WaPo.
Furthermore, isn’t it mildly ironic that a piece that discusses “allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003″ has done a bang up job hyping and manipulating the intelligence themselves for this ’story’?
Hat tip: Confederate Yankee, who is all over this story.
Read more via Captain Ed, Riehl World View, Junkyard Blog, James Joyner
PM Update I: Seixon (bookmark him!) absolutely slams the WaPo piece in a post called “Hydrogen Warfare” (hat tip AJ Strata). Lorie Byrd ponders what it feels like to be President Bush everyday.
Related Toldjah So posts:
- MSNBC Hardball correspondent David Shuster caught in multiple reporting errors
- How the media undermines US national security
- The military and the media, the war in Iraq, etc
- The media spin on Operation Swarmer
- Irresponsible Journalism
- Gray Lady Down – a slam against the NYT
- “If 1941 Were 2005″
- The media’s war
- Winning in spite of defeatist attitudes
- Dems and media determined to ignore Iraq progress
- The undermining of this war
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I am curious as to why this part of the article was not also posted to your entry:
Back at the Pentagon, DIA officials attempted a quick resolution of the dispute. The task fell to the “Jefferson Project,” a DIA-led initiative made up of government and civilian technical experts who specialize in analyzing and countering biological threats. Project leaders put together a team of volunteers, eight Americans and a Briton, each with at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills needed for bioweapons production. All were nongovernment employees working for defense contractors or the Energy Department’s national labs.
The technical team was assembled in Kuwait and then flown to Baghdad to begin their work early on May 25, 2003. By that date, the two trailers had been moved to a military base on the grounds of one of deposed president Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad palaces. When members of the technical team arrived, they found the trailers parked in an open lot, covered with camouflage netting.
The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.
By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.
“Within the first four hours,” said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, “it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs.”
And also:
Team members and other sources intimately familiar with the mission declined to discuss technical details of the team’s findings because the report remains classified. But they cited the Iraqi Survey Group’s nonclassified, final report to Congress in September 2004 as reflecting the same conclusions.
That report said the trailers were “impractical for biological agent production,” lacking 11 components that would be crucial for making bioweapons. Instead, the trailers were “almost certainly designed and built for the generation of hydrogen,” the survey group reported.
The group’s report and members of the technical team also dismissed the notion that the trailers could be easily modified to produce weapons.
“It would be easier to start all over with just a bucket,” said Rod Barton, an Australian biological weapons expert and former member of the survey group.
The technical team’s preliminary report was transmitted in the early hours of May 27, just before its members began boarding planes to return home. Within 24 hours, the CIA published its white paper, “Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants,” on its Web site.
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.
“It was very assertive,” said one weapons expert familiar with the report’s contents.
Then, their mission completed, the team members returned to their jobs and watched as their work appeared to vanish.
“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.”
This last part of the article, at least to me, confirms what the headline stated.
Sooooo what exactly was the point of the mobile trailers??? Can anyone tell us that?? Just because something is “impractical” doesn’t mean it wasn’t used for that purpose. It’s impractical for us to continue to mint pennies, but we do. I have long suspected that Saddamn created these as mobile aspirin factories. After seeing Billy Bob’s propensity to destroy such dangerous places, Saddamn decided he better take his aspirin production on the road. That’s my theory and I am sticking to it. Hydrogen manufacturing stations for weather ballons???? I am presently in the mid-west, let me tell you what the weather is going to be like in Baghdad today. HOT!!! How many weather ballons does a man need to tell him that??? I also heard that these labs were washed down with chlorine so there were no trace elements left behind. Why do that if they were for “weather ballons”?? These were mobile for a reason, and that reason was not for weather ballons. Unless Saddamn was completely innane, not just a tyranical insane dictator. Weather Ballons, riiiiight. Like I always say, it is easier to nail jello to the wall than get the truth out of a liberal, even if he be a man of science. – Lorica
Point being that there was a difference of opinon between the experts. Again. Just like the constitutional question whether or not the president can surveille the enemy (Arlen Specter)
- Ah yes, get ready for the usual yammering and breathless outrage against the Pres. on this one. Of course the real problem at the bottom of all these points, ie. Aluminum tubes, Bio-weapons trailors, WMD stockpiles, Nuclear program etc etc etc, is the CIA beuracracy which is badly in need of fixing, not the Exec. The Pres. has to depend on the voracity and accuracy of the Intel he gets from the various agencies for the lions share of reasoning he has to use in making national and international policy decisions. If that info is bad theres not a hell of a lot he can do about it until after the fact.
- Never the less we’ll get to listen to yet another round of Leftard blame shifing, and false claims about admin conspiracies under every bed. The left has raised perfidity to a new level, and their phoney polito-rags, like WAPO/NYTrash, carry their lies to print every day.
- Bang
Sigh…you guys take the cake sometimes. Why do you assume that the team of “military experts” that reviewed the trailers had exactly the same level of expertise as the team of civilian experts specifically put together to go over the trailers. Is the opinion I get from Joe’s Auto Shack as worthy as the opinion I get from my dealer’s service center? If I got two opinions from two grease monkeys that my car is in great shape, and my dealer says it’s about to blow, do the grease monkeys win out 2 to 1? And secondly, even if they had the same experience (which I doubt) why is it okay for the President to go out and unequivocally state that we found evidence of WMDs? Where was the nuance, the caveats, the explanations? Nowhere. What does that reflect? And intent to deceive us into believing that the caveats and nuance weren’t there at all. And that’s a lie. So…somebody in the Bush administration is full of shit. Either Bush knew and he said it anyway, or he didn’t know and someone in his administration deserves to have their ass fired yesterday for not telling him. Which is it ladies and gents?
- Its a the CIA dumbass. Get it. Thats where your culture of ineptness and good old boy clubbiness resides. As long as you asshats keep trying to shift the blame you will get neither an improved level of security/Intel, nor a winning plan at the ballot box.
- You sound like the guy who insists on looking for the watch he lost under the street light because he can see better there. In other words you’re agenda driven, which is why you keep getting stomped in national elections. “We’re not Bush” just doesn’t get it. Get it?
- Bang
Alexander??? What makes you think that the Military Scientists aren’t better than the Civilian??? Army Research Labs is in control of billions of dollars, and has Labs in almost every major university across the country. When it comes to toxic Bio Agents, I would put my money on the military scientists. After all they are the “Dealership” when it comes to this specific product. Good attempt and confusing who the grease monkeys are in this situation. – Lorica
The mobile labs alleged use for making hydrogen for weather balloons has absolutely never made any sense to me. I have never seen such a facility, for making bio-hydrogen, especially in as hydrocarbon rich a country as Iraq is. It’s almost like these things were not good or well designed biowar labs, so some “analysts” came up with some other idea of what they were. Here’s a hint, they don’t have to be a great biowar lab to be a biowar lab, Hussein bought a fair number of bogus and substandard stuff from people trying to rip him off. I believe these were intended as biowar labs, nothing else makes any sense.
I totally agree with you Severian. Common street smart sense tells you that Iraqi scientists were just probably working to earn money and didn’t have access to all of the tools/research/modernity of American scientists. It was about keeping Saddam thinking they were producing. It was about keeping your head from being chopped off.
But liberals want to act all smart and say these were mobile weather balloon hydrogen making labs. Geez. And then expend millions of pages of print in the WaPo/NYT/USA T and other newspapers getting the people like I used to be before 1991 believing that conservatives are evil and that Bush lied when Bush was saying the same thing as Clinton, Gore, Albright, Kerry. Liberals are so deranged their only comment to that is that Bush was the one who brought us to war as if Democrats in Congress didn’t vote for it.
I’m sure I’ll never see another time like this in history. It’s crazy. Crazy I say.
Bang, your comment is just stupid. Are you telling me that this report-a report which comments on the only evidence for the primary justification for the war-was transmitted to the CIA and that the CIA just neglected to tell anybody in the Bush administration about it?
Beyond that, what you say addresses none of my comments.
By the way, given Bush’s recent poll numbers, “we’re not Bush” might be all it takes.
Lorica-
I’m sorry, but you assume too much. You are assuming that these unnamed “military experts” are of the same qualifications as this team of scientists and engineers. The article doesn’t say as much, and there’s no evidence of such.
But even if we assume that they are as qualified, should not a report that contradicts them flatly from a team as qualified as this team of civilians, give Bush or anyone else in the administration pause before claiming that WMDs had been found? Lets even assume Bush somehow didn’t know about this report when he made his comments. Why then did members of the administration continue to claim for months unequivocally that WMDs had been found, when this report clearly contradicted that? You assume too much good faith on their part I think.
And a final comment on the larger picture. We are all aware here that we’re arguing about pretty much just a couple of trailers, right? That, even if everything the Bush supporters here said was true, the only evidence we’d have of WMDs is a couple of decrepit trailers, right?
- Wolfe – The idea that there was any “one primary” reason for going into Iraq is the fundemental strawman yopu asshats try to contend. There was no “one primary” reason. It was an aggragate of reasons, as you leftards know full well. But if you don’t then I suggest you go back and listen to all your beloved Marxist heros, Dean, LurchKerry, and Hellery. They all layed out a myriad of reasons, and yammered loud and clear about “the imminent threat” Saddam and his regime represented. The left just ping pongs back and forth between their broken record phoney screeds and selective amnesia.
- If you think “We aren’t Bush” is a winning theme in the total absense of any clear party plan I have some Florida swamp gas for sale – cheap.
- The Looney Left; The gift that just keeps on giving…
- Bang
No Alexander. We have found WMDs in Iraq. These trailers we are discussing are about his production capabilities not whether there were WMDs in Iraq or not. They were there. – Lorica
As far as your comments about my earlier post. All I was trying to get you to realize is that Military Scientists are not Gomer Pyles. Trust me there are alot of good scientists on both sides. – Lorica
Alexander Wolfe LIES by saying, “That, even if everything the Bush supporters here said was true, the only evidence we’d have of WMDs is a couple of decrepit trailers, right?”
You can continue to be intellectually lazy or do some research. There have been WMD’s found but not in the quantity of stockpiles. It’d be nice if you bashers actually weren’t negligent. Being responsible for your word takes more work.
Aid and comfort to the enemy is easy. Especially behind the keyboard and in an armchair. Good luck with that….