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Iraq: U.S. Analysts Conclude Iraqi Trailers Were Definitely Intended for Biological Weapons U.S. analysts have determined that two trailers recovered in Iraq were designed to be mobile biological weapons laboratories, but the experts found no traces of biological agents within the trailers or evidence that they ever produced such agents, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, May 14). Intelligence analysts working in the United States and Baghdad reached their conclusions after analyzing — and later dismissing — alternative theories as to how the trailers could have been used, senior Bush administration officials said. The findings were presented to the White House yesterday. “The experts who have crawled over this again and again can come up with no other plausible legitimate use,” a senior U.S. official said. In their paper, the analysts described the trailers as an “ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system,” an official said. The paper rejected alternative theories for the trailers’ intended use, such as producing hydrogen gas for weather balloons, germs for agricultural biopesticides, or regenerated rocket fuel, according to the Times. The trailer that was analyzed in greatest detail was thoroughly cleaned with an unidentified caustic agent, making it impossible to determine whether or not it had ever produced biological agents, officials in Iraq and the United States said. “It may have, we don’t know,” a senior Bush administration official said. “What we know is that it is equipped to do that,” the official added. Regardless of whether they were actually used to produce biological weapons, the trailers violated U.N. Security Council resolutions, a senior Bush administration official said. “It was surely capable of producing biological weapons agent,” the senior administration official said. “Iraq never told the United Nations that it had made such units. Why would you have a covert program for filling weather balloons?” the official added (Miller/Broad, New York Times, May 21).
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