The
Washington Post has an interesting article on the WMD debate leading up to the Iraq war.
From WaPo:
WASHINGTON--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. 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.
This story will be at the top of Page One in WaPo on Wednesday.
It is no longer a question of a smoking gun on manufactured intelligence regarding WMD
It is a mushroom cloud of lies!
More from WaPo:
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.
snip ...
``There was no connection to anything biological,'' said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: ``the biggest sand toilets in the world.''
Do you believe this shit???
So much for the Winnebagos of Death.
More from WaPo:
Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. But officials familiar with the technical team's reports are questioning anew whether intelligence agencies played down or dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the administration's public views about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Last year, a presidential commission on intelligence failures criticized U.S. spy agencies for discounting evidence that contradicted the official line about banned weapons in Iraq, both before and after the invasion.
Why let the truth get in the way of a jolly little war?
What a bunch of scumbags
