It's all Curveball's fault

Huge piece in the Washington Post fully debunking the mobile biolabs claim, and exposing the president's political fabrication of intelligence required to maintain it. These were the reputedly bioweapon-producing trucks Colin Powell so compellingly cited in his February 2003 United Nations brief, from intelligence crafted by the Iraqi fabricator, Curveball.

Curveball's detailed descriptions -- which were officially discredited in 2004 -- helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N. Security Council.

After the war, a couple of trucks with tanks in the back were found. An intelligence team was immediately dispatched to examine them. Lo:

"Within the first four hours," said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, "it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs."

This was on May 25, 2003.

News of the team's early impressions leaped across the Atlantic well ahead of the technical report. Over the next two days, a stream of anxious e-mails and phone calls from Washington pressed for details and clarifications.

On May 27, the intelligence group unanimously informed the DIA that the trucks were not biological weapons labs. That apparently wasn't going to stop President Bush from claiming vindication, for two days later:

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."

Well, maybe there was some confusion. Of course there was plenty of time to correct the record:

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.

I suppose it wasn't in the national security interest to declassify this particular bit of intelligence.

What next?

Update: Well, given the White House's blustering and ineffective denunciation of the Washington Post story, the above title seems exactly appropriate. National Public Radio excerpts from Scott McClellan's hilarious attempts at righteous indignation, while interviewing reporter Joby Warrick. Press conference transcript here.

While McClellan tries lobbing invective at the Washington Post and repetitively blaming the intelligence community, reading the full transcript reveals serious weaknesses of the administration's defense. First, McClellan won't even refer to team's report of May 2003. Instead:

Now, we know that the Iraq Survey Group, which we had go into Iraq to search for the weapons of mass destruction, looked into this issue, and it was September 2004, I think, that they concluded that certainly this was not for biological weapons production.

This is an attempt to passively assert that the May 2003 DIA report was not definitive, by not referring to it. This excuses the president's, Powell's, and Cheney's repetition of the claim until 2003, despite contrary evidence.

And then McClellan lies:

And the assessment that the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the arm of the Pentagon, made initially was that those -- in this report that was released on May 28, 2003, was that the labs that were found were for producing biological weapons.  And that assessment remained in place for quite some time, as you just pointed out.

This is explicitly contrary to the original article. McClellan claims the DIA report confirmed the biolab suspicions, when everyone spent their morning reading an article telling us the report dis-confirmed said suspicions. What is going on here?

Now, I will point out that the reporting I saw this morning was simply reckless and it was irresponsible.  The lead in The Washington Post left the impression for the reader that the President was saying something he knew at the time not to be true.  That is absolutely false and it is irresponsible, and I don't know how The Washington Post can defend something so irresponsible.

Actually, it doesn't. As you see from my accompanying comments, there was left open the possibility that there was some sort of bureaucratic SNAFU, with the opportunity later to correct the record. Instead of retraction, however, we saw the Vice President and the Secretary of State repeating the claims well after the initial report was made. McClellan -- naturally -- doesn't speak to that.