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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DavesM who wrote (413175)	6/9/2003 10:24:41 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

If you read though the administration BullS**t interpretations you can see the facts correspond accurately with the uses I have described. ph.ucla.edu WASHINGTON -- <font color=purple>Two trailers the U.S. believes to be Iraqi production labs for biological weapons had an inefficient design and contained chemicals unrelated to making biological agents, according to an intelligence-agency report.</font> Yet their only plausible use was as mobile facilities for making biological agents, a month-long investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded. That finding is based largely on the trailers' similarity to descriptions of mobile labs given by Iraqi defectors before the war. The major source of the information was a chemical engineer at the plant that operated the vehicles, CIA officials said. The trailers are the only publicly disclosed possible evidence the U.S. has found in Iraq in its search for proof of Iraqi efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction -- a major justification for the U.S. invasion. U.S. officials have gone to considerable lengths to document their reasons for believing the trailers were meant for secret weapons work. The CIA made available several officials, including weapons experts with degrees in chemical engineering and microbiology, to explain the findings. Biological-weapons production "is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles," the report says. It says the trailers, one of which had been looted, appear designed to produce slurries of bacteria, including anthrax and botulinum toxin. Officials said Iraq is believed to have other trailers for drying and processing the product into weapons-grade agents, but <font color=purple>no such vehicles have been found.</font> Officials acknowledged it was possible the two trailers were never used to produce biological agents, and said they may have been idled to avoid detection.<font color=purple> Investigators found no traces of biological agents on the vehicles</font>. But a fermenter installed in one of the trailers was made in Iraq earlier this year, indicating work on the vehicles was under way even while United Nations weapons inspectors were in Iraq. Iraqis questioned recently have told the U.S. that biological weapons were produced in Iraq from 1998 to as recently as six months before the U.S. invasion, a U.S. intelligence official said. <font color=purple>He didn't provide details.</font> No stocks of biological weapons have been found in Iraq, and the Bush administration has been forced to acknowledge that Iraq may not have possessed weapons of mass destruction immediately before the U.S. invasion. In a speech Tuesday in New York, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Iraq may have destroyed its weapons of mass destruction before the war. Late last year, British Prime Minister Tony Blair published a dossier of intelligence on Iraq's alleged chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons programs, which asserted among other things that Iraq could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes. Mr. Blair, traveling to Kuwait on his way to visit Iraq Thursday, told reporters he still had "no doubt" allies would find stocks of chemical or biological weapons, rather than just evidence of a program. <font color=purple>The two trailers found near Mosul contained storage tanks and a system for capturing exhaust gases</font>, which the U.S. says was aimed at hiding weapons production. The fermenters, <font color=purple>however, weren't well-suited to weapons work because growth agents couldn't be easily added or removed, an official said. "It's probably not how you would want to design a bioweapons plant.</font> It was designed to evade inspections, not to be efficient," an intelligence official said. Defectors have told the U.S. that an accident on one such trailer killed 12 during a production run in 1998. The incident, the report says, shows "Iraq was producing [biological-weapons] agent at that time." <font color=purple>The Iraqis later altered the design, installing a cooling system to prevent overheating, the U.S. said. The report says sodium azide and urea were found in one of the fermenters.</font> U.S. intelligence officials said the caustic chemicals may have been put there to mislead weapons inspectors in case the vehicles were discovered. "It's a strange combination of materials," said one official, adding that the two chemicals are sometimes used in production of conventional explosives. <font color=purple>Iraqi officials at the Al Kindi Research, Testing, Development and Engineering facility, where one of the trailers was found, told interrogators they were used for making hydrogen gas to fill weather balloons. Tests on one trailer yielded traces of aluminum powder, which could be used for making hydrogen.</font> U.S. officials said that while the trailers' equipment could be used to make hydrogen, the system was far larger than needed to fill weather balloons and certainly bigger than other commercially available mobile hydrogen-production units. The U.S. officials said testing on the aluminum powder indicated the concentrations were insufficient for making hydrogen gas. <font color=purple>Iraqi officials at the plant that produced the fermenters for the trailers told U.S. investigators that they had been told the units were for hydrogen production</font>. The Iraqis also told the investigators that they didn't believe hydrogen production was the real use, but that "they had learned not to ask questions," a U.S. official said. The administration wants to pretend that the inadequecies of the trailers for biological work is an attempt to be deceptive. If they were inspected the inspectors would see the biological sludge. It's abusurd to think they would leave out half the working parts as a deception. The real telling datapoint is the excessive heat reaction that required the installation of a cooling system.<font color=green> Now what kind of biological activity produces so much heat that it burns a dozen people and requires auxillary cooling? </font> It's completely absurd. An acid-metal reaction would however create a lot of heat if the acid consentration was too strong. These desparate lies are an indication of stalling. The most likely stalling is for time to plant some more convincing fabrication but it could just be a stall for an attack on another victim country. Note also the conflicting rationalization that the trailers were both too large for a hydrogen plant and the aluminum was not concentrated. Of course the cheaper aluminum and acid with a larger volume would give them just the amount of gas they need. TP