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U.S. Suppressed Intelligence on Iraq, Expert Says
One year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the White House continued to suppress intelligence findings that Baghdad had not possessed mobile biological weapons facilities, according to a book published today by an Australian weapons inspector (see GSN, March 29, 2005). Two trailers found in April 2003 were initially believed to be used for producing biological weapons, the Associated Press reported. Tests in early May uncovered no evidence of biological agents, and members of a U.S. fact-finding mission said in a classified report later that month that the trailers had not been involved in weapons work, the Washington Post reported in April (see GSN, April 12). The trailers were more likely used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. However, Bush administration officials for months afterward continued to point to the trailers as evidence of Iraqi WMD efforts, AP reported. Rod Barton, an Australian microbiologist who worked with the Iraq Survey Group, said U.S. officials blocked him from publicly noting that the trailers were not believed to be weapons facilities. “You don’t understand how difficult it is to say anything different” than the official CIA line, the U.S. head of the biological team said, according to Barton’s book, “The Weapons Detective.” A CIA officer in February 2004 forbade Barton from including the trailers in a report, the book states. “I don’t care that they are not biological trailers. It’s not politically possible,” the officer reportedly said. The trailers were not included in the Iraq Survey Group’s March 2004 report, AP reported. Barton said he and other Australian and British experts quit the WMD search team then rather than remain “complicit in deceit.” The final Iraq Survey Group report, in October 2004, stated that the trailers had not been weapons facilities. Charles Duelfer, the last ISG chief, said he did not face pressure from Washington to leave out intelligence in his reports. Rather, he wanted to address the entire matter in the final report. “I did not think those were mobile biological weapons labs,” he said. “I wanted to understand the issue of mobile BW production, whether it (the trailers) was part of a larger thing or not.” Former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said, “There was no effort to stifle any reporting from the field” (Charles Hanley, Associated Press I/phillyBurbs.com, May 14). Meanwhile, recently released court documents show that Vice President Dick Cheney questioned a 2002 trip by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq had sought to buy uranium for possible use in a nuclear weapons program. The trip was organized by the CIA, where Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked as an undercover CIA operative, Agence France-Presse reported. “Have they done this sort of thing before?” Cheney wrote on July 2003 in the margins of a recent New York Times piece in which Wilson charged that the Bush administration had overstated the case for war. “Send an (ambassador) to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?” Cheney told Lewis Libby, his chief of staff at the time, that Plame worked for the CIA, the federal court documents state. Her identity was made public about a month later. Libby has been indicted in connection with the case (see GSN, Oct. 31, 2005; Agence France-Presse, May 14). The court documents leave open the possibility that prosecutors believe Cheney was behind the decision to leak Plame’s identity to the press, AP reported. The notes “support the proposition that publication of the Wilson op-ed acutely focused the attention of the vice president and [Libby] on Mr. Wilson, on the assertions made in his article, and on responding to those assertions,” special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said in the documents filed Friday (Pete Yost, Associated Press/The Montana Standard, May 14).
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