Administration Response to WMD

The White House reacted stridently to The Washington Post story about bioweapons in mobile trailers by claiming that the President did not know about the report issued by the task force two days before he told a television audience that “we had found the weapons of mass destruction.” They accused the Post of “irresponsible” reporting.

Well let's just think about this. We had just invaded Iraq and teams were unsuccessfully scouring the country looking for the weapons the Administration had repeatedly claimed were there and, at that time, were the sole justification for going to war. When two trailers were found in April, a combined CIA/DIA team was put together to go to Iraq and examine them. This was going to be the first hard evidence in support of the claims. It is easy to visualize senior administration officials lining up to hear the results. Unfortunately, the report did not support the Administration position; in fact it completely contradicted it. It is difficult to believe that the results were not known immediately, and if so we have another disturbing lie from the White House.

But if the President really didn’t know about the report, that fact hardly exonerates the administration. Why wasn’t he informed? One more example of incompetence in running the country? Or did senior DOD officials not forward this information in order to keep the news from getting out. What they did do was to classify it to keep it from view. Yet in June and September 2003 and February 2004, Powell, Cheney, and Tenet continued to ignore the report while stating that the mobile trailers were bioweapons labs. How could this be anything other than deliberate subterfuge?