Smoke Alarm: Yet More Evidence for War Crimes

Sunday, 14 May 2006
Ex-WMD Inspector: Politics Quashed Facts (AP)

Here's yet another smoking gun revealing the fireless smoke of lies that the Bush Regime spread across the land to justify its outright war of aggression in Iraq. How many more times do we have to be shown glaring evidence that the war was a con job from the word go, that lies were told – deliberate lies, knowing lies, lies now soaked with innocent blood – by leaders who drape themselves in Christian piety, before this crime is at last called by its rightful name, and the long-dormant, hard-rusted machinery of justice begins to move against these death-dealing hypocrites?

Excerpts from AP: A year after Bush administration claims about Iraqi "bioweapons trailers" were discredited by American experts, U.S. officials were still suppressing the findings, says a senior member of the CIA-led Iraq inspection team.

At one point, former U.N. arms inspector Rod Barton says, a CIA officer told him it was "politically not possible" to report that the White House claims were untrue. In the end, Barton says, he felt "complicit in deceit."

…. Much sought after for his expertise, Barton served on the U.N. Iraq arms inspection teams of 1991-98 and 2002-03. After the U.S. invasion, he was an aide to chief U.S. inspector Charles Duelfer.

The Washington Post reported last month that a U.S. fact-finding mission confidentially advised Washington on May 27, 2003, that two truck trailers found in Iraq were not mobile units for manufacturing bioweapons, as had been suspected. Two days later, President Bush still asserted the trailers were bioweapons labs, and other administration officials repeated that line for months afterward.

… The debunking of the "mobile biolabs" claim began in classified reports long before the U.S. invasion, when German intelligence in 2001 and 2002 told U.S. officials that the story's source, an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," was unreliable, official investigations later found. U.N. inspectors determined in early 2003, before the war, that parts of Curveball's story were false….

Testing the equipment in early May 2003, U.S. experts found no traces of biological agents, and later that month the U.S. fact-finders filed their negative report from Baghdad. But on May 29, Bush assured Polish television: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." Then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell later made similar statements. As late as January 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney called the trailers "conclusive evidence" of Iraqi WMD, one of the reasons given for invading Iraq. The experts' findings were classified, never to be released, The Washington Post reported last month.

***Chris Floyd***