In April of 2003, in the northern Iraqi desert near Irbil, Kurdish troops discovered a flatbed trailer with a military paint job, covered with tarps. Under the tarps they found an assortment of metal tanks, pipes, motors and compressors affixed to the trailer. Around the same time there was a similar discovery by US troops near Mosul. And there was much rejoicing in the White House!
For many years apocryphal stories about mobile bioweapons labs in Iraq had circulated around Washington. You've heard of the legendary Iraqi informant and nutbird, Curveball; he was a primary purveyor of these stories. The information reaching the Bush administration about the above discoveries seemed to fit the descriptions provided by Curveball. In retrospect it is clear that this was all they needed, and that they would not be deterred by any contradictory evidence. They were off to the races with their claim that weapons of mass destruction had at last been found in Iraq.
Back in February, before there was any hard evidence to back up his claim, Colin Powell had told the U.N. all about Saddam's mobile WMD labs. This was based solely on the descriptions provided by Curveball. Then on May 29, 2003, George Bush stood on the foundation provided by the discovery of those two trailers and proclaimed, "we have found the weapons of mass destruction." Later, in June, Powell stated that the administration was increasingly confident that the trailers were bioweapons labs. In September, Dick Cheney said that the trailers were capable of producing "anthrax or smallpox." As recently as February of 2004, George Tenet, then still head of the CIA, asserted that the trailers "could be made to work" as weapons labs.
The Bush administration continued to sell their story of the WMD labs that they had found in Iraq after the invasion (the "smoking gun") in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, and there was plenty of evidence. Curveball's assessments of the trailers were hotly contested by members of the intelligence community and even by other Iraqi informants. Curveball himself was known not to be reliable in the first place. So it was that on May 25, 2003, a highly expert team assembled by the DIA arrived in Baghdad to examine the trailers and develop their own assessment. They were charged with resolving the controversy over exactly what those trailers were, and they quickly, within a few hours, decided that they had nothing whatsoever to do with biological weaponry. They delivered their initial report, which had remained classified until last week, on May 27. But the Bush people already had the story they wanted. On May 28 the CIA published a report titled "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," which accounted for the trailers in much the same way George Bush would in his speech the very next day. The report produced by the experts on the ground, the ones who had actually seen the trailers, was ignored.
This is simply one more example of the way the administration cooked the books on Iraq, and one more reason we cannot trust anything they tell us.