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The French government has been notably restrained in their criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for unleashing a pandemic upon the world.  One possible reason for their reticence is a single, highly embarrassing fact: They essentially built the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab in which the coronavirus now sweeping the world was being researched, and from which it escaped.  That the French delivered the turn-key, high-containment biolab to China has long been public knowledge, but now a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has added riveting details to the story.  The insider information comes from interviews with French...

April 12, 2006 More deception from the Washington Post While the Washington Post frets about a U.S. military "propaganda campaign" against Zarqawi that consists of spreading true information reasonably calculated to save American lives, the Post conducts a propaganda campaign against the administration that's based on distortion. The latest instance is today's story on the Bush administration's statements that certain Iraqi trailers were biological laboratories. As Ed Morrissey shows, the Post's report is highly deceptive. While trumpeting the fact that a team of experts concluded after the invasion that, contrary to the administration's claim, the trailers were not bio labs,...

SYDNEY: There is clear evidence Iraq had a biological weapons programme even though none of the armaments have been found there since US-led forces invaded the country, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Thursday. Downer cited a US Central Intelligence Agency report released yesterday, which said two trucks had been discovered in northern Iraq filled with laboratory equipment, as proof that Iraq had such a programme. No prohibited weapons were found in the trucks, but US intelligence officials say the vehicles fit a description from an Iraqi source of a mobile biological weapons laboratory. "The equipment has now been...

From Captain's Quarters:  I have written several times about the issue of the mobile laboratories in Iraq and the subsequent conventional wisdom that they served as hydrogen generators for weather balloons instead of WMD production facilities. In April, I pointed out that the hydrogen theory came as a minority opinion within the CIA/DIA teams that reviewed the two labs captured by the Coalition. One month later, Joseph Shahda translated a key memo showing that the Iraqis spent $33 million on the mobile labs in September 2002, while America decided to take military action against the Iraqis, and that the same...

ABC News Iraq WMD red flags ignored, ex-CIA aide tells paper Reuters June 25, 2006 WASHINGTON - A former CIA officer says he made repeated efforts to alert top agency officials to problems with an Iraqi defector's claims about the country's mobile biological weapons labs but he was ignored, the Washington Post reported on Sunday. CIA officer Tyler Drumheller said he personally crossed out a reference to the labs from a classified draft of a U.N. speech by Secretary of State Colin Powell because he recognized the source as a defector, code-named Curveball, who was suspected to be mentally unstable...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Wednesday angrily denied a newspaper report that suggested President George W. Bush in 2003 declared the existence of mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq while knowing it was not true. "It's reckless reporting. Everybody should be agitated about it," White House spokesman McClellan told reporters of The Washington Post report. On May 29, 2003, Bush hailed the capture of two trailers in Iraq as mobile biological laboratories and declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." Two days earlier, on May 27, 2003, the Pentagon confirmed on Wednesday, a Defense Intelligence Agency...

The Bush administration yesterday denounced a Washington Post report that questioned the handling of postwar intelligence on alleged Iraqi biological weapons labs. A White House spokesman acknowledged that President Bush's assertions about the suspected labs were in error but said this was caused by flawed intelligence work rather than an effort to mislead. Bush press secretary Scott McClellan criticized the article as "reckless" for what he said was an "impression" that Bush had knowingly misled the American public about the two Iraqi trailers seized by U.S. and Kurdish fighters weeks after the Iraqi invasion began. On May 29, 2003, Bush...

The White House on Wednesday hit back at The Washington Post for its front-page story this morning which suggested President Bush in 2003 cited the discovery of mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq as "weapons of mass destruction" just after the Pentagon received a top-level report revealing this was not true. Press Secretary Scott McClellan called the account "reckless reporting" and asked media outlets who carried it to apologize. He said Bush made his statement based on multiple sources. Appearing on MSNBC Wednesday night, the Post reporter who wrote the piece, Joby Warrick, stood by the reporting, and said he...

... "The lead suggested that what the president was saying was based on something that had been debunked, and that is not true," McClellan said. "In fact, the president was saying something that was based on what the intelligence community - through the CIA and DIA - were saying." ...

The White House faced new questions Wednesday about President Bush's contention three years ago that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. The Washington Post reported that a Pentagon-sponsored team of experts determined in May 2003 that two small trailers were not used to make biological weapons. Yet two days after the team sent its findings to Washington in a classified report, Bush declared just the opposite. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction," Bush said in an interview with a Polish TV station. "We found biological laboratories." Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said Wednesday that Bush was...

Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, April 12, 2006; A01 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. and Kurdish 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...

<p>The CIA yesterday concluded that two truck trailers seized by coalition forces in northern Iraq were designed by Saddam Hussein's regime to produce biological weapons agents.</p> <p>A six-page agency white paper said an examination of the trailers' equipment showed that "BW [biological weapons] agent production is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles."</p>

April 3, 2005 Day of the Serial Fabricator (See original for reference links) Edward Jay Epstein In a scathing ad hominem attack on the Commission on Intelligence Capabilities in the New York Times today, Maureen Dowd protests: "It is absurd to have yet another investigation into the chuckleheaded assessments on Saddam's phantom W.M.D. that intentionally skirts how the $40 billion-a-year intelligence was molded and manufactured to fit the ideological schemes of those running the White House and Pentagon." She then implores, "Please, no more pantomime investigations." Despite such ridicule from Dowd, the nine-person bipartisan Commission is not without credentials and...

Yahoo! News   Fri, May 30, 2003 Hunt for Iraqi Weapons Shifting Gears 47 minutes ago By MATT KELLEY, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - A large new U.S. team heading into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction will shift its focus away from areas identified as suspicious sites before the war, the Army general heading the effort said Friday. Instead, the searchers will focus on areas where documents, interviews with Iraqis and other new clues suggest biological or chemical weapons could be hidden, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton said. Dayton leaves Monday for Baghdad, where he will head the...

A trailer found by the U.S. in Northern Iraq last year was likely used by Saddam Hussein's regime as a mobile biological weapons laboratory, and not to fill hydrogen balloons as some in Britain and the U.S. have charged, a view supported by exclusive photos obtained by WorldNetDaily that for the first time offer inside views of the trailer components. Kurdish forces seized the trailer in April 2003 at a checkpoint near Mosul in northern Iraq. At the time, the unit was hailed as the closest U.S. forces may had come to finding a "smoking gun" in their search for...

OPERATION: IRAQI FREEDOM Is this one of Saddam's mobile bio-weapons labs? WND obtains photos of unit capable of producing WMDs -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: October 6, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern By Aaron Klein © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com A trailer found by the U.S. in Northern Iraq last year likely was used by Saddam Hussein's regime as a mobile biological weapons laboratory, and not to fill hydrogen balloons as some in Britain and the U.S. have charged, a view supported by exclusive photos obtained by WorldNetDaily that for the first time offer inside views of the trailer components

A trailer found by the U.S. in Northern Iraq last year likely was used by Saddam Hussein's regime as a mobile biological weapons laboratory, and not to fill hydrogen balloons as some in Britain and the U.S. have charged, a view supported by exclusive photos obtained by WorldNetDaily that for the first time offer inside views of the trailer components. Kurdish forces seized the trailer in April 2003 at a checkpoint near Mosul in northern Iraq. At the time, the unit was hailed as the closest U.S. forces may have come to finding a "smoking gun" in their search for...

A trailer found by the U.S. in Northern Iraq last year likely was used by Saddam Hussein's regime as a mobile biological weapons laboratory, and not to fill hydrogen balloons as some in Britain and the U.S. have charged, a view supported by exclusive photos obtained by WorldNetDaily that for the first time offer inside views of the trailer components.

May 31, 2003 Powell Defends Information He Used to Justify Iraq WarBy JAMES DAO and THOM SHANKER ASHINGTON, May 30 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today fiercely defended the intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify war against Iraq, saying he spent several late nights poring over the Central Intelligence Agency's reports because he knew the credibility of the country and the president were at stake.The C.I.A.'s prewar assessments have been sharply questioned by some intelligence officials and lawmakers in recent days, as American forces have uncovered only limited evidence of unconventional weapons programs and Iraqi...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell conceded Friday evidence he presented to the United Nations that two trailers in Iraq were used for weapons of mass destruction may have been wrong. In an airborne news conference on the way home from NATO talks in Brussels, Belgium, Powell said he had been given solid information about the trailers that he told the Security Council in February 2003 were designed for making biological weapons. But now, Powell said, ``it appears not to be the case that it was that solid.'' He said he hoped the intelligence commission appointed by President...