<< "How could I know this and the president--with complete power of resources--not know this?" >>
....May 28, 2003, the CIA and DIA publicly issued a ten-page report titled "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants." You can download the report here.
cia.gov
The joint CIA/DIA report unequivocally and enthusiastically proclaimed the mobile trailers that had been discovered in Iraq to be mobile bioweapon facilities. It included photographs of the trailers, descriptions of various components, comparisons of the trailers to descriptions given by Iraqi informants. The report said:
Coalition forces have uncovered the strongest evidence to
date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program. …
US forces in late April also discovered a mobile laboratory
truck in Baghdad. The truck is a toxicology laboratory from
the 1980s that could be used to support BW or legitimate
research. The design, equipment, and layout of the trailer
found in late April is strikingly similar to descriptions
provided by a source who was a chemical engineer that
managed one of the mobile plants.
The intelligence agencies concluded:
[W]e nevertheless are confident that this trailer is a
mobile BW production plant because of the source’s
description, equipment, and design.
The next day, May 29, 2003, President Bush gave an interview to a Polish television station in which he said:
<<< We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. >>>
It is obvious that when President Bush said on May 29 that two mobile bioweapon facilities had been found, he was accurately repeating what the CIA and DIA had not only told him privately, but had publicly reported to the American people, just the day before. There is no reason to assume that President Bush had any knowledge of a preliminary field report, representing a then-minority view, that had been shipped back to Washington only 48 hours before; nor would such a preliminary report of a minority view have justified ABC's claim--even had Bush become aware of it--that "the President knew at the time that was not true."
We are living through an extraordinary era, in which our principal news media have scarcely any regard for truth, and have dedicated themselves monomaniacally to destroying the President of the United States and his administration.
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