Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Judith Miller Proved Fucking Right
In my last post I raved about Joby Warrick's article in the Washington Post today: Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War.
Finally...three years later the truth has come out.
Whoops.
This is mostly old news...covered three years ago...by...would you believe it...Judith Fucking Miller?
From Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use 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."
Read the rest. I dare you.
The date of that article was June 7, 2003...yep...that's right...more than two weeks before Judy's first noted conversation with Scooter Libby.
Not to take anything away from Warrick's work (the news that the experts' report was shelved certainly qualifies as a scoop-and-a-half) but check out this graphic from the Washington Post which accompanies the big article: From 'Biological Laboratories' to Harmless Trailers.
On the timeline June 27 is marked as the day "Powell says the U.S. intelligence community is increasingly confident that the trailers were used to make bioweapons" followed by "Summer: News reports raise doubts about the intended use of the trailers."
But The New York Times got there much quicker than that.
Judith Miller was proved fucking right.
Imagine if Judy Miller hadn't been transferred off the WMD beat soon after that article was published. Maybe the fuller picture raised in this Washington Post story could have come out in 2003 or sometime before November of 2004.
Yikes.
Judith Miller proved fucking right...now I've heard everything.
UPDATE
A lot of good stuff at this link including the CIA's white paper referred to in the Post article ("Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants" is also viewable at the CIA website at this probably dangerous link) and a few Times articles from the spring of 2003 including the Miller one noted above.
The white paper actually attacked the New York Times for an editorial written on May 13:
A New York Times article on 13 May 2003 reported that an agricultural expert suggests the trailers might have been intended to produce biopesticides near agricultural areas in order to avoid degradation problems. The same article also reported that a former weapons inspector suggests that the trailers may be chemical-processing units intended to refurbish Iraq’s antiaircraft missiles.
* Biopesticide production requires the same equipment and technology used for BW agent production; however, the off-gas collection system and the size of the equipment are unnecessary for biopesticide production. There is no need to produce biopesticides near the point of use because biopesticides do not degrade as quickly as most BW agents and would be more economically produced at a large fixed facility. In addition, the color of the trailer found in mid-April is indicative of military rather than civilian use.
* Our missile experts have no explanation for how such a trailer could function to refurbish antiaircraft missiles and judge that such a use is unlikely based on the scale, configuration, and assessed function of the equipment.
* The experts cited in the editorial are not on the scene and probably do not have complete access to information about the trailers.
From the May 13 Times editorial:
American military inspectors have found what they consider their most persuasive evidence yet that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction: three trailers that look as if they may be mobile biological weapons laboratories. Should the evidence hold up after more thorough analysis, it would validate at least one of the claims made by the Bush administration in arguing that Iraq had an active biological weapons program. But at this point it is difficult to know for sure whether these mobile units were part of a program to produce unconventional weapons or served a more benign purpose.
Two of the suspicious trailers contained equipment that American military experts concluded was almost certainly intended to produce biological weapons. These included, in one trailer or the other, a fermenting machine, a dryer, a system to bring in fresh water and eliminate contaminated water, and equipment to contain the emission of gases that might give away the laboratory's purpose. Yet outside critics say it remains possible that the military investigators, who have cried wolf several times in the past, may once again have misinterpreted what they are seeing.
From a New York Times editorial published on June 1, 2003:
President Bush may be convinced that two trailers found in Iraq were used as biological weapons labs, but the evidence is far from definitive. Referring to the two trailers in an interview with Polish television before he departed for Europe last week, Mr. Bush said the United States had found weapons of mass destruction and banned manufacturing devices in Iraq. Reports from the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency support that view, but they are based on inconclusive information.
Intelligence analysts told reporters last week that the configuration of equipment in the trailers would not work efficiently as a biological production plant, is not a design used by anyone else and would not lead anyone to link the trailers intuitively with biological weapons. The intelligence officials took all that as a sign that the Iraqis were ingeniously clever in trying to hide the true nature of what they were doing from international inspectors. But the uncertainties leave open the disquieting possibility that the trailers might not be what the intelligence agencies think they are. It seems increasingly imperative, as this page has argued before, to get an authoritative, unbiased assessment from the United Nations or some other independent body.
But the strongest Times article on the phoney baloney bio lab trailers isn't on the above cited Website.
That would be Agency Disputes C.I.A. View of Trailers as Iraqi Weapons Labs reported by Douglas Jehl and published on June 26, 2003 (the day after Libby and Miller talked):
The State Department's intelligence division is disputing the Central Intelligence Agency's conclusion that mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making biological weapons, United States government officials said today.
In a classified June 2 memorandum, the officials said, the department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said it was premature to conclude that the trailers were evidence of an Iraqi biological weapons program, as President Bush has done. The disclosure of the memorandum is the clearest sign yet of disagreement between intelligence agencies over the assertion, which was produced jointly by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency and made public on May 28 on the C.I.A. Web site. Officials said the C.I.A. and D.I.A. did not consult with other intelligence agencies before issuing the report.
....The reasons cited in the State Department memorandum to justify its dissent could not be learned. But in interviews earlier this month in Washington and the Middle East, American and British analysts with direct access to the evidence also disputed the C.I.A.'s claims, saying that the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment.
....The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research is a small but important agency in the intelligence community. Its principal purpose is to provide the Secretary of State and his top advisers with intelligence analysis independent of other agencies, but it also has a voice in the drafting of national intelligence estimates and other documents that are supposed to reflect the consensus of the intelligence community.
The fact that the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. did not consult with other agencies in producing the so-called white paper reflects a rare but not unknown approach, officials from the intelligence agencies and Congress said. The government's intelligence apparatus spans more than a dozen agencies, and officials usually try to reach consensus before making their findings public.
The exclusion of the State Department's intelligence bureau and other agencies seemed unusual, several government officials said, because of the high-profile subject.
Administration officials said the State Department agency was given no warning that the C.I.A. report was being produced, or made public.
Yep...that would be the same Central Intelligence Agency that right wingers claim conspired against the Bush Administration to hurt their dirty, not-so-little war. The bad guys that forced Bush to heroically defend against by authorizing selective intelligence leaks which were little more than lies.
The Times took pride in these articles. They singled them out in their post-war "apology."
From The Times and Iraq: A Sample of the Coverage
The "biological weapons labs":
This is one example of a claim that was quickly and prominently challenged by additional reporting
• May 21, 2003: U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs to Germ Arms
The story left the impression that the Administration claims represented a consensus, because we did not know otherwise. By June 7, however, the same reporters, having dug deeper, published a front-page story describing the strong views of dissenting intelligence analysts that the trailers were not bio-weapons labs, and suggesting that the Administration may have strained to make the evidence fit its case for war. (Last Sunday, Mr. Powell conceded that the C.I.A. was misled about the trailers, apparently by an Iraqi defector.)
• June 7, 2003: Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use
• June 26, 2003: Agency Disputes C.I.A. View on Trailers as Weapons Labs
Already, the right wing blogs are in attack mode...implying that the Washington Post is lying, misinterpeting or just plain treasonous.
Captain's Quarters, Riehl World View and Confederate Yankee are all trying to make hey-hay out of this paragraph from Joby Warrick's Post article:
Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.
See...that's what the Post gets for trying to appear balanced. They threw in a paragraph quoting unnamed intelligence analysts and a former senior official so that the opposing pundits wouldn't attack them for being one-sided. Instead...the right uses that paragraph in an attempt to attack the article.
As Miller noted above, the opposing experts were "more senior analysts." And they appear to be the third team on the scene. They're the ones that did a fuller analysis. As Rumsfeld noted many times in the war...first reports are often wrong.
The fact is that the work of "more senior analysts" was suppressed...and the Bush Administration went with a sloppy rush report which reflected what they wanted to reflect.
Captain's Quarters calls this the Minority Report but in reality it appears to be the Final Report and the ones that took place before were probably not even deliberately deceptive reports. The earlier reports could have been just to be on the safe side reports.
UPDATE 2
More spring of 2003 news...this time from Britain's Guardian (Sunday Observer), Iraqi mobile labs nothing to do with germ warfare, report finds by Peter Beaumont, Antony Barnett and Gaby Hinsliff and published on June 15, 2003:
An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.
The conclusion by biological weapons experts working for the British Government is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, who has claimed that the discovery of the labs proved that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction and justified the case for going to war against Saddam Hussein.
Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them. They are exactly what the Iraqis said they were - facilities for the production of hydrogen gas to fill balloons.'
The conclusion of the investigation ordered by the British Government - and revealed by The Observer last week - is hugely embarrassing for Blair, who had used the discovery of the alleged mobile labs as part of his efforts to silence criticism over the failure of Britain and the US to find any weapons of mass destruction since the invasion of Iraq.
The Post reported that the Pentagon sent the team which appears to be the same as the Guardian reported on. Perhaps it was Blair's government that insisted on sending this third team of experts...or they did it in unison with the Pentagon.
Come on, Mick Smith...quit slacking...there's gotta be some good Downing Street memos you can round up with more on this.
Did the Brits fight for this report to be released?
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