Defense Officials Pushed Biolab Bunk, Too

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In the morning press gaggle, White House spokesman Scott McClellan danced around the issue of why the president continued to insist those Iraqi trailers were mobile bioweapons labs, when they were known to be no such thing.

But Bush wasn’t the only one. While the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency debunked the story in a May 27, 2003 report, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, along with Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, continued to push the mobile weapons labs quackery for months:

5/29/03 – Rumsfeld: We have teams of people that are out looking. They’ve investigated a number of sites. And within the last week or two, they have in fact captured and have in custody two of the mobile trailers that Secretary Powell talked about at the United Nations as being biological weapons laboratories. We have people who are telling that they worked in these vehicles. And they look at panels and say, ‘That was my work station in that panel, and that’s what it’s for.’

5/31/03 – Wolfowitz: We have found those biological vans that the defector in Germany told us about. They seem to be exactly what he said they would be. And I would think that would pretty well corroborate the rest of his story which is they were for the production of biological weapons.

6/3/03 – Wolfowitz: We — as the whole world knows — have in fact found some significant evidence to confirm exactly what Secretary Powell said when he spoke to the United Nations about the development of mobile biological weapons production facilities that would seem to confirm fairly precisely the information we received from several defectors, one in particular who described the program in some detail. But I wouldn’t suggest we’ve gotten to the bottom of the whole story yet.

7/7/03 – Feith: Now in time, we’ll learn the truth about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. But given what we knew the Iraqi regime had and did — for example, its use of poison gas against Iranians and Kurds, its program to deceive the U.N. inspectors, its cooperation with terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, and its failure to account for known WMD items, including the mobile biological weapons labs — the danger of WMD in Saddam’s hands appeared grave.

Ed. Note: thanks to Reader DK for the tip.

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