America's Matrix, Revisited
By Robert Parry
April 12, 2006
On June 1, 2003, I wrote an article entitled “America's Matrix,” questioning claims by the Bush administration that the discovery of two specially equipped train cars was proof that Iraq was secretly manufacturing biological warfare agents.
At the time, more than two months after the Iraq invasion, George W. Bush was getting edgy because the promised stockpiles of banned weapons hadn't materialized. So, on May 29, 2003, he hailed the discovery of the supposed mobile “biological laboratories” as conclusive proof that “we have found the weapons of mass destruction,” a claim that would be repeated by administration officials for the next several months.
But any careful reading of the published intelligence reports about the train cars would have shown Bush's assertion to be just the latest exaggeration of WMD evidence about Iraq. Even the evidence marshaled in a “white paper” by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency fit much better with the explanation that the train cars were designed to produce hydrogen for battlefield weather balloons.
Now, nearly three years later, the Washington Post has published an article revealing that Bush made his flat assertion about the train cars two days after a Pentagon-sponsored mission informed Washington that the trailers had nothing to do with producing biological weapons. Those findings from a nine-member team of U.S. and British scientists and engineers were in a three-page field report -- followed three weeks later by a 122-page final report -- but the contrary information was stamped “secret” and shelved.
As senior administration officials, including the President and Secretary of State Colin Powell, continued to make false claims about the “biological laboratories,” the nine-member team disbanded. “I went home and fully expected that our findings would be publicly stated,” one team member told the Post. “It never happened. And I just had to live with it.” [Washington Post, April 12, 2006]
Back in spring 2003, however, the readiness of the Bush administration to mislead the American people and the readiness of the U.S. news media -- and many citizens -- to go along led me to compare what was happening in the United States to the false reality of the Matrix movies. (The second film in the trilogy, “The Matrix Reloaded,” had just been released.)
In a slightly edited form, we are reprinting our June 1, 2003, story below:
“Matrix” and its sequels offer a useful analogy for anyone trying to make sense of the chasm that has opened between what’s real and what Americans perceive is real. Like the science-fiction world of the trilogy, a false reality is being pulled daily over people’s eyes, often through what they see and hear on their TV screens. Facts have lost value. Logic rarely applies.
Some living in this “American Matrix” are like the everyday people in the movies, simply oblivious to what’s going on beneath the surface, either too busy or too bored to find out. Others appear to know better but behave like Cipher, the character in the original movie who chooses the fake pleasures of the Matrix over what Morpheus calls “the desert of the real.”
Many Americans so enjoyed the TV-driven nationalism of the Iraq War, for instance, that they didn’t want it spoiled by reality. During the conflict, they objected to news outlets showing mangled bodies or wounded children or U.S. POWs. Presenting the ugly face of war was seen as unpatriotic or somehow disloyal to “the troops.” Only positive images were welcome and dissent was deemed almost treasonous.
Now, even as U.S. forces in Iraq slide closer to the guerrilla-war quagmire that some skeptics predicted, Americans continue to say they trust George W. Bush to handle the situation. Some military analysts close to the Bush administration are beginning to feel differently, however. “We’re hanging on by our fingernails,” one told me.
But Americans still prefer to feel good about the war. They want to believe that the U.S. invasion was just, and that Saddam Hussein really was poised to use weapons of mass destruction. By large majorities, Americans either believe that these weapons have already been found or they don’t care that the Bush administration may have misled the world.
The Disputed Labs
For its part, the U.S. news media – from Fox News to the New York Times – repeatedly trumpeted supposed weapons discoveries, only to play down later stories showing that the original reports were bogus. The only evidence Bush now cites is the discovery of two mobile labs that the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency insist could be used for producing biological weapons.
“Those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons are wrong,” Bush declared, referring to the mobile labs. “We found them.”
Yet, the U.S. intelligence analysis of these labs is more a piece of the American Matrix than a dispassionate examination of the evidence. The report reads like one more example of selective intelligence, which spurns plausible alternatives if they don’t fit Bush’s political needs.
In this case, the Bush administration, which said for months that the Iraqi weapons secrets would be revealed once U.S. forces captured and questioned Iraq’s top scientists, now doesn’t like what those scientists are saying. When questioned, the captured scientists said the labs were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.
In the CIA-DIA report, U.S. analysts agreed that hydrogen production was a plausible explanation for the labs. “Some of the features of the trailer – a gas collection system and the presence of a caustic – are consistent with both bio-production and hydrogen production,” the CIA-DIA report said. “The plant’s design possibly could be used to produce hydrogen using a chemical reaction.”
The report also noted that “preliminary sample analysis results are negative for five standard BW agents, including bacillus anthracis, and for growth media for those agents.” Also missing are companion mobile labs that would be needed “to prepare and sterilize the media and to concentrate and possibly dry the agent, before the agent is ready for introduction into a delivery system, such as bulk-filled munitions,” the CIA-DIA report said.
In other words, U.S. intelligence analysts found no evidence that these labs had been used to make biological weapons or that the two labs alone could produce weaponized BW agents. But that was obviously the wrong answer.
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