Posted on 06/06/2003 9:14:09 PM PDT by Brian S
By JUDITH MILLER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment.
"Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process."
The Bush administration has said the two trailers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, are evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof.
Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light.
Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said the dissenters "are entitled to their opinion, of course, but we stand behind the assertions in the white paper."
In all, at least three teams of Western experts have now examined the trailers and evidence from them. While the first two groups to see the trailers were largely convinced that the vehicles were intended for the purpose of making germ agents, the third group of more senior analysts divided sharply over the function of the trailers, with several members expressing strong skepticism, some of the dissenters said.
In effect, early conclusions by agents on the ground that the trailers were indeed mobile units to produce germs for weapons have since been challenged.
"I have no great confidence that it's a fermenter," a senior analyst with long experience in unconventional arms said of a tank for multiplying seed germs into lethal swarms. The government's public report, he added, "was a rushed job and looks political." This analyst had not seen the trailers himself, but reviewed evidence from them.
The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons.
Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon.
Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank.
Senior intelligence officials in Washington rebutted the skeptics, saying, for instance, that the Iraqis might have obtained the needed steam for sterilization from a separate supply truck.
The skeptics noted further that the mobile plants had a means of easily extracting gas. Iraqi scientists have said the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. While the white paper dismisses that as a cover story, some analysts see the Iraqi explanation as potentially credible.
A senior administration official conceded that "some analysts give the hydrogen claim more credence." But he asserted that the majority still linked the Iraqi trailers to germ weapons.
The depth of dissent is hard to gauge. Even if it turns out to be a minority view, which seems likely, the skepticism is significant given the image of consensus that Washington has projected and the political reliance the administration has come to place on the mobile units. At the recent summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Bush cited the trailers as evidence of illegal Iraqi arms
Critics seem likely to cite the internal dispute as further reason for an independent evaluation of the Iraqi trailers. Since the war's end, the White House has come under heavy political pressure because American soldiers have found no unconventional arms, a main rationale for the invasion of Iraq.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who also used Iraqi illicit weapons as a chief justification of the war, has been repeatedly attacked on this question in Parliament and outside it.
Experts described the debate as intense despite the American intelligence agencies' release last week of the nuanced, carefully qualified white paper concluding that the mobile units were most likely part of Iraq's biowarfare program. It was posted May 28 on the Internet at www.cia.gov.
"We are in full agreement on it," an official said of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency at a briefing on the white paper.
The six-page report, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," called discovery of the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program."
A senior administration official said the White House had not put pressure on the intelligence community in any way on the content of its white paper, or on the timing of its release.
In interviews, the intelligence analysts disputing its conclusions focused on the lack of steam sterilization gear for the central processing tank, which the white paper calls a fermenter for germ multiplication.
In theory, the dissenting analysts added, the Iraqis could have sterilized the tank with harsh chemicals rather than steam. But they said that would require a heavy wash afterward with sterile water to remove any chemical residue - a feat judged difficult for a mobile unit presumably situated somewhere in the Iraqi desert.
William C. Patrick III, a senior official in the germ warfare program that Washington renounced in 1969, said the lack of steam sterilization had caused him to question the germ-plant theory that he had once tentatively endorsed. "That's a huge minus," he said. "I don't see how you can clean those tanks chemically."
Three senior intelligence officials in Washington, responding to the criticisms during a group interview on Tuesday, said the Iraqis could have used a separate mobile unit to supply steam to the trailer. Some Iraqi decontamination units, they said, have such steam generators.
The officials also said some types of chemical sterilization were feasible without drastic follow-up actions.
Finally, they proposed that the Iraqis might have engineered anthrax or other killer germs for immunity to antibiotics, and then riddled germ food in the trailers with such potent drugs. That, they said, would be a clever way to grow lethal bacteria and selectively decontaminate the equipment at the same time - though the officials conceded that they had no evidence the Iraqis had used such advanced techniques.
On the second issue, the officials disputed the claim that the mobile units could make only small amounts of germ-laden liquids. If the trailers brewed up germs in high concentrations, they said, every month one truck could make enough raw material to fill five R-400 bombs. These were a standard Iraqi munition for anthrax.
Finally, the officials countered the claim that the trailers had no easy way for technicians to drain germ concoctions from the processing tank. The fluids could go down a pipe at its bottom, they said. While the pipe is small in diameter - too small to work effectively, some analysts hold - the officials said high pressure from an air compressor on the trailer could force the tank to drain in 10 or 20 minutes.
A senior official said "we've considered these objections" and dismissed them as having no bearing on the overall conclusions of the white paper. He added that Iraq, which declared several classes of mobile vehicles to the United Nations, never said anything about hydrogen factories.
Some doubters noted that the intelligence community was still scrambling to analyze the trailers, suggesting that the white paper may have been premature. They said laboratories in the Middle East and the United States were now analyzing more than 100 samples from the trailers to verify the intelligence findings. Allied forces, they noted, have so far failed to find any of the envisioned support vehicles that the trailers would need to produce biological weapons.
One skeptic questioned the practicality of some of the conjectural steps the Iraqis are envisioned as having taken to adapt the trailers to the job of making deadly germs.
"It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," he said of the central tank. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that's true of any tin can."
The reporting for this article was carried out by Judith Miller in Iraq and Kuwait and by William Broad in New York. Her agreement with the Pentagon, for an "embedded" assignment, allowed the military to review her copy to prevent breaches of troop protection and security. No changes were made in the review.
If you read all the conspiracy posts on FR you would assume the opposite. According to them, all the US G does is cover up with hundreds (a US Destroyer) in on the cover up. And not one peep from anyone - in this age of cell phones, internet and hungry reporters. I do agree with you. The US would be foolish to try and fake any WMD. Every gov agreed they had them otherwise, why the inspectors? He had years to hide them.
A senior administration official conceded that "some analysts give the hydrogen claim more credence." But he asserted that the majority still linked the Iraqi trailers to germ weapons.
Whatever the roles of these truck trailers turn out to be, this "hydrogen" idea sounds bogus and sounds like more deception. While other processes are being researched; e.g. for fuel cells, most bulk industrial hydrogen is now generally produced in oil refineries, in a fixed plant. Seemed to me like Iraq had some of these...
See http://www.greatachievements.org/greatachievements/ga_17_2.htm:
Since World War II the demand for light products (gasoline, jet, and diesel fuels) has grown, while the requirement for heavy industrial fuel oils has declined. In 1947, a process called "platforming" introduced platinum as a catalyst in the refining process. This resulted in fewer emissions, removed much of the sulfur and other contaminants, and generated significant amounts of hydrogen and other raw materials used to manufacture plastics. The availability of hydrogen was one of the most far-reaching developments of the refining industry in the 1950s. Since 1980, hydrogen processing has become so prominent that many refineries now incorporate hydrogen manufacturing plants in their processing schemes.
They were used to brew fresh beer for the troops at those remote outposts.
(/sarcasm)
I agree. My (admittedly limited) knowledge of the types of microorganisms/fermentations capable of producing hydrogen does not suggest that this is the way a country with major oil production and refining capabilities would choose to produce hydrogen.
So you're admitting that if they had been scrubbed clean with, say, a caustic substance, that the only plausible use for them would be bioweapon plants?
Try as I might, I see no benefit using this route.
Thinking my point through a bit more, doing it as an imaginary debate between competing analysts:
Analyst 1: It was a weapons lab. The hydrogen excuse doesn't work, because the metals in the vehicle show no sign of being exposed to hydrogen for any period of time.My mindset is along that of my fictional analyst 1.Analyst 2: They show no sign of being exposed to biological agents either. Besides, one of the two we have in hand was obviously just constructed, and may not even have been finished. It is possible that these were constructed for the processing of hydrogen for weather balloons, but not yet used.
Analyst 1: That is possible, but it is so unlikely as to defy credulity. The Iraqis did not say they were building these vehicles to process hydrogen, they said that the vehicles they had were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. So by their own words, they had been using such vehicles. Where are the vehicles they were using for the purpose of gassing up weather balloons? Why have we not found any of these vehicles showing permeation of the vessels with hydrogen?
Analyst 2: I don't know, but I object to jumping to a conclusion because we have not found counter evidence. I concede we have found no evidence to support the claim they were used to produce hydrogen. But we have found no evidence to support the claim they were used to produce bioweapons.
Analyst 1: The difference is, they have an interest in hiding the vehicles from inspection if they were used for weaponry. No such interest exists if they were used for hydrogen processing. They clearly were not open to letting us inspect the vehicles (and accounting for all of them) prior to the war. And we still have not found any that were used for hydrogen processing. If they were telling the truth, they would be there for us to find. The only explanation that makes sense is that they had them, they were used for evil purposes, and then they either hid them or destroyed them.
Analyst 2: But that isn't the only possibility. As bizarre as it sounds, they may have had them for benign purposes and on principle hid them from us.
You ask where the labs are that show evidence of having been used for weapons. I ask, where are the trucks that show evidence of having been used for hydrogen processing for weather balloons?
I can think of a good reason why we have not found those used on weapons (they hid or destroyed them). I can't think of a good reason why we have not found any used on hydrogen, which tells me that they had none used on hydrogen.
It is assumed that they were scrubbed clean because no credible other use for the vehicle has been presented. The hydrogen excuse is not credible, despite the claims of the people in this article, for the reasons I describe just above.
So if you have these vehicles, and you can't think of a non-weapons use for the vehicles that makes sense, and the Iraqi's explanation for the use of the vehicles is shown to not be the case on the vehicles in hand, and you can't find any vehicles showing evidence of being used the way the Iraqis say they were used, where does that leave you?
Of course, we could have planted it earlier and avoided all of this firestorm. I wonder why we didn't?
A couple of plastic washtubs with holes in them are found in a Maryland pond, and this constitutes 'evidence' Hatfill may have used them to make the postal anthrax.
Two hidden Iraqi tractor trailer trucks - identical to the ones illustrated to the UN by Secretary Powell - with obvious fermenters and other bio-manufacturing gear are found intact in Iraq and unnamed 'skeptics' have 'serious doubts' they were used for what they obviously were intended for.
Only in places like New York Times Alternate Liberal Universe does cooking up such bullshiite come so easily!
That's because you are not looking at the big picture.
The electorate doesn't care. The electorate is damn relieved Saddam is gone -- whether or not they suspect, in the back of their minds, that the last 18 months was always really about Saddam, not bin Laden and his merry men. The electorate is damn happy to see that we liberated Iraq from an evil dictator. The electorate will be even happier when gas prices fall below $1 a gallon in the next few months. And the electorate will be damn satisfied with the job Bush has done on the national security crisis if, as seems likely, the presidential election rolls around without any follow-up to 9/11.
The Democrats will try to make the failure to find WMD an issue. The electorate won't care -- therefore, Bush doesn't care. Further, the Dems need to be careful what they wish for, because Bush has booby-trapped the whole deal. Supposing the Democrats do get a wide-ranging investigation into what we really know about 9-11. Well, congress already tried to get the CIA to cough up, and the CIA balked. You know what the biggest thing they balked on was? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Can you guess why they balked on the issue of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and who Khalid Sheikh Mohammed worked for? The Democrats aren't going to like the answer to that, if they ever find it out. Similarly, the question of what "secret intelligence" ultimately motivated Colin Powell to wave that little vial of phony anthrax at the UN is ultimately going to lead back to the question: who sent the anthrax? And, while full disclosure on that might well be embarassing for the administration, it would make the Democrats look much, much worse. Do you see how sweet this setup is?
What about the rest of the world? Don't we need to convince them that we were on the up-and-up when we used WMD to justify attacking Iraq? Not really, provided the issue is spinnable either way -- which it will be. The less we come up with in terms of WMD, the tougher we look. In fact, if we told the real story on WMD, we actually wouldn't look very tough at all. And the question becomes, is it better to be feared or to be loved? And the answer to that question, as Machievelli pointed out in The Prince, is that it is much better to be feared than to be loved.
Great angle. Had not thought of it, but I like it.
But this is the New York Times, and it is utterly untrustworthy. It is possible that Miller and Broad are reporting accurately. It is equally possible that they made it all up. There's simply no way to tell.
The Times should stop reporting any story which relies on the trust of the reader in the honor of the reporters and editors.
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