the Bush administration falsified the WMD issue to buttress its posture
for going to war in Iraq. This story in */_The Washington Post_/* of
April 12th 2006 carries the sub-title "administration pushed notion of
banned Iraqi weapons despite evidence to contrary".
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_041206Z.shtml
QUOTED EXCERPT: [first 5 paragraphs] 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. 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. END QUOTE
