{"id":7114,"date":"2006-04-12T09:10:38","date_gmt":"2006-04-12T13:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=7114"},"modified":"2006-04-12T09:10:38","modified_gmt":"2006-04-12T13:10:38","slug":"about-those-biolabs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/about-those-biolabs\/","title":{"rendered":"About those biolabs…"},"content":{"rendered":"

At a certain point, one starts to wonder if anything<\/i> Bush has said about Iraq is true. The latest<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”<\/p>\n

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As the WaPo explained, the Pentagon launched a secret fact-finding mission to Iraq to investigate the trailers and — surprise, surprise — found that they had nothing to do with biological weapons. Apparently, it wasn’t a particularly tough call. “Within the first four hours,” said one team member, “it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs.”<\/p>\n

The team completed a unanimous report and sent their findings to Washington on May 27, 2003 — two days before the president’s statement. The field report with the facts was then shelved while the president and other administration officials — for nearly a year — routinely pointed to these trailers as weapons factories.<\/p>\n

So, were the trailers related to weapons at all? Not so much.<\/p>\n

“There was no connection to anything biological,” said one expert who studied the trailers. Another recalled an epithet that came to be associated with the trailers: “the biggest sand toilets in the world.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They lied. They knew they were lying. They lied anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At a certain point, one starts to wonder if anything Bush has said about Iraq is true. The latest: On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}