Jim Yanik wrote:
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...-now-know-jim-
lacey
excerpts;
SADDAM AND WMDS
When American tanks smashed into Baghdad, Saddam had already
completed construction of an anthrax production facility, which
was a week away from going live. If it had been permitted to go
into production, this one facility could have produced ten tons
of weaponized anthrax a year.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1150
With much of southern Iraq in the hands of coalition forces by the
weekend after the opening of hostilities, reporters naturally started
asking where the weapons we "Bush administration officials were
peppered yesterday with questions about why allied forces in Iraq have
not found any of the chemical or biological weapons that were President
Bush's central justification for forcibly disarming Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein's government," the Washington Post reported (3/23/03).
Miraculously, the answer seemed to come that Sunday night (3/23/03),
when military officials told the media of a "chemical facility" found in
the southern town of Najaf. "Bob, as you know, there's a lot of talk
right now about a chemical cache that has been found at a chemical
facility," MSNBC anchor Forrest Sawyer told White House correspondent
Bob Kur. "I underscore, we do not know what the chemicals are, but it
sure has gotten spread around fast."
It sure had. Over on Fox News Channel (3/23/03), the headline banners
were already rolling: "HUGE CHEMICAL WEAPONS FACTORY FOUND IN SO
IRAQ.... REPORTS: 30 IRAQIS SURRENDER AT CHEM WEAPONS PLANT.... COAL
TROOPS HOLDING IRAQI IN CHARGE OF CHEM WEAPONS." The Jerusalem Post,
whose embedded reporter helped break the story along with a Fox
correspondent, announced in a front-page headline (3/24/03), "U.S.
Troops Capture First Chemical Plant."
The next day (10/24/03), a Fox correspondent in Qatar quietly issued an
update to the story: The "chemical weapons facility discovered by
coalition forces did not appear to be an active chemical weapons
facility." Further testing was required. In fact, U.S. officials had
admitted that morning that the site contained no chemicals at all and
had been abandoned long ago (Dow Jones wire, 3/24/03).
So went the weapons hunt. On numerous occasions, the discovery of a
stash of illegal Iraqi arms was loudly announced--often accompanied by
an orgy of triumphalist off-the-cuff punditry--only to be deflated
inconspicuously, and in a lower tone of voice, until the next false
alarm was sounded. In one episode, embedded NPR reporter John Burnett
(4/7/03) recounted the big news he'd learned from a "top military
official": "the first solid confirmed existence of chemical weapons by
the Iraqi army." According to Burnett, an army unit near Baghdad had
discovered "20 BM-21 medium-range rockets with warheads containing sarin
nerve gas and mustard gas."
When NPR Morning Edition anchor Susan Stamberg asked Burnett, "So this
is really a major discovery, isn't it?" he assented: "If it turns out to
be true, the commander told us this morning this would be a smoking gun.
This would vindicate the administration's claims that the Iraqis had
chemicals all along." Of course, it turned out not to be true. A
Pentagon official, Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, told reporters the next
day (4/8/03) that he had "seen nothing in official reports that would
corroborate that."
On April 26, ABC World News Tonight blared an "exclusive" report: "U.S.
troops discover chemical agents, missiles and what could be a mobile
laboratory in Iraq." Correspondent David Wright explained that the Army
soldiers had found "14 55-gallon drums, at least a dozen missiles and
150 gas masks" testing positive for chemical weapons, including a nerve
agent and a blistering agent. He added that an Army lieutenant "says the
tests have an accuracy of 98 percent."
Perhaps somewhat self-consciously, ABC followed Wright's report with a
short segment about previous weapons claims that turned out to be false
alarms. But the network continued to pump the story the next day, with
anchor Carole Simpson introducing it as the lead segment on World News
Sunday (4/27/03): "For the second day in a row, some of the preliminary
tests have come back positive for chemical agents."
But when the U.S. Mobile Exploration Team (MET Bravo) arrived on the
scene to conduct its own tests, it "tentatively concluded that there are
no chemical weapons at a site where American troops said they had found
chemical agents and mobile labs," the New York Times reported the next
day (4/28/03). A member of the team told the Times simply: "The earlier
reports were wrong."
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lots more stuff here
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Centerpiece or hot air?
Having suffered a series of public humiliations from the conspicuous
absence of unconventional weapons, the administration made it known that
it was pinning its hopes on two trailers found in northern Iraq, which
they termed mobile biological weapons labs. On May 12, NBC News
correspondent Jim Avila, reporting from Baghdad, declared that the labs
"may be the most significant WMD findings of the war." Joining him was
hawkish former U.N. nuclear inspector David Kay (now an "NBC News
analyst"), who was flown to Iraq to perform an impromptu inspection for
the cameras. Armed with a pointer, he rattled off the trailer 's parts:
"This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under
pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter...." In his
report, Avila didn't explain how and why Kay and the NBC crew obtained
access to the trailers while the legally mandated U.N. inspection team,
UNMOVIC, had been barred from looking at them.
The trailers quickly became the "centerpiece" (New York Times, 5/21/03)
of the administration's argument that Iraq was indeed hiding a
biowarfare program, and Bush himself used them to proclaim (5/31/03)
that "for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing
devices or banned weapons, they're wrong. We found them." No actual
biological agents were found on the trucks, though; nor were any
ingredients for biological weapons. In fact, no direct evidence linked
the trailers to biological production at all.
U.S. officials said the trailers' equipment was capable of making such
agents. Even then, the unconcentrated slurry that resulted could not
have been put into a weapon: "Other units that we have not yet found
would be needed to prepare and sterilize the media and to concentrate
and possibly dry the agent, before the agent is ready for introduction
into a delivery system," the CIA's report admitted (5/28/03).
Iraqi scientists who worked at the institute where one of the trailers
was found offered a different explanation: They told interrogators that
the labs were used to produce hydrogen for military weather balloons.
"Even while conceding that the equipment could, in fact, have been used
occasionally to make hydrogen" (New York Times, 5/21/03), the CIA report
dismissed that explanation, reasoning that such a production technique
"would be inefficient." (Yet the weapon-making technique imputed to the
trailers was also "inefficient," an intelligence official admitted--New
York Times, 5/29/03.) In fact, a technical analysis alone, they said,
"would not lead you intuitively and logically to biological warfare"
(New York Times, 5/29/03).
On the other hand, the trailer's equipment "appeared to contain traces
of aluminum, a metal that can be used to create hydrogen." Yet that was
discounted by U.S. officials, who said the aluminum "might have been
planted by Iraqis to create the illusion that the units had made gas for
weather balloons" (New York Times, 5/21/03).
A few weeks later, a front-page New York Times article by Judith Miller
and William Broad (6/7/03) quoted senior intelligence analysts who
doubted the trailers were used for biological weapons. "I have no great
confidence that it's a fermenter," one WMD specialist said of a key
piece of equipment on the trailer. (In his TV performance on NBC, David
Kay had evinced total confidence that it was.) The CIA report, he said,
"was a rushed job and looks political."
Analysts noted that the trailers "lacked gear for steam sterilization,
normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production." "That's
a huge minus," said a U.S. government biological expert who had been
quoted in an earlier Judith Miller article endorsing the
administration's theory. "I don't see how you can clean those tanks
chemically." A senior administration official was quoted admitting that
"some analysts give the hydrogen claim more credence."
It's worth noting that in the 1980s, the British defense contractor
Marconi received a government-backed loan to sell the Iraqi army an
Artillery Meteorological System, an artillery radar system that uses
weather balloons to track wind patterns (London Guardian, 2/28/03).