I have prepared a report on yet another Iraq invasion lie

I've been digging into one of the justifications for invading Iraq proffered by the Bush crew over the last two years. Bear with me, as this gets into chemistry.

Let's take a look at the Winnebagoes of Death. You will remember these as the mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq so dramatically described by Colin Powell before the UN in February of 2003. "We have firsthand descriptions," said Powell, "of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. The trucks and train cars are easily moved and are designed to evade detection by inspectors. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War. Ladies and gentlemen, these are sophisticated facilities. For example, they can produce anthrax and botulism toxin."

Scary stuff. Too bad it wasn't true.

The basis for these claims came from a CIA/DIA report that was made public in May of 2003. Since its release, and Powell's performance before the UN, the report has been shot to pieces.

In June of 2003, the UK Guardian reported, "An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist. The revelation that the mobile labs were to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons will also cause discomfort for the British authorities because the Iraqi army's original system was sold to it by the British company, Marconi Command & Control."

The thing is, despite the fact that Powell publicly distanced himself from his now-humiliating UN display, and despite several reports in the British press describing in detail what these mobile facilities were actually used for, you can still hear Bush defenders talk about them in the American press to defend the invasion. The story behind the CIA/DIA report, and its massive flaws, has not been widely reported over here. Yet it was one of several key threats thrown at the American people to justify a war.

"They can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month," said Powell in February of 2003, "to kill thousands upon thousands of people. And dry agent of this type is the most lethal form for human beings." In other words, bring me the plastic sheeting and duct tape, because we're all going to die.

I spoke at length with an expert in this area named Brad Spencer, Ph.D, who took a great deal of time to explain the flaws in the CIA/DIA report, and the flaws in the subsequent scaremongering that came out of the White House.

"Bush was relying on the CIA/DIA white paper that purported to conclude that the trailers found in Iraq were mobile biological culture systems," said Spencer. "That's the only hard evidence he ever cited, and it was false form the start. There are obvious fabrications in the white paper, fabrications that fly in the face of science. It's garbage. It's a lie. It is the most easily proved of all the lies yet it is still allowed to stand. I have made hydrogen using the same reaction as was used by the Iraqis on those trailers. I could tell from the information in the white paper itself that the trailers were for hydrogen manufacture. How much more blatant and obvious do you need a lie to be before you expose it as such?"

As I have never been strong in the science department, I asked Dr. Spencer to describe in detail the problems with the report. "I can tell you," he said, "that I know that the reaction used generates a lot of heat along with the hydrogen and that the cooling unit is a necessary part of the system. The fable the white paper weaves about the Iraqis discovering that the heat of summer interfered with WMD culture and adding the unit, added because the drawings by Powell showed no cooling unit and the difference had to be explained, is utter nonsense. In reality, any competently designed biological culture system, mobile or otherwise, would have to have not merely a cooling unit but a full temperature control system for the culture vessel."

"The reaction used on the trailer to make hydrogen (aluminum metal plus sodium hydroxide plus water)," said Spencer, "has been used for that purpose since the early part of the 20th century (there's at least one US patent from that date for a system that uses that reaction) and was also mentioned in a 1960's or 1970's National Geographic article. I was in graduate school at the time and performed the reaction at home, learning in the process that the heat was produced: I ended up more than once with a bottle of boiling lye solution with a balloon on the neck of the bottle. The trailers surely produced hydrogen at something like 100 to 1000 times the volume I produced, with corresponding increase in the amount of heat evolved. It would be essential to remove that heat to avoid damage to valves and pumps from boiling lye."

"The culture vessel also would not be the very obvious pressure vessel seen in the photograph in the white paper," Spencer continued. "The trailer had no shocks, no springs. It would be idiotic to do a biological culture under pressure on such a system: the stresses involved in moving it would cause leaks and a biological WMD culture system under pressure would spew biological WMD out from any leak. Nor is there likely to be an advantage to doing the culture under pressure: pressure is used to enhance the yields of chemical reactions in the gas phase where the reactant gases combine to form a product gas. Under such situations (e.g., the manufacture of polyethylene), increased pressure does increase yield."

"The compressor and gas bottles are needed to compress and store the hydrogen," said Spencer, "as the white paper essentially admits. The fable about a tell-tale off-gas that had to be compressed and stored is fantastically ridiculous. The UN inspectors weren't monitoring the atmosphere for any such by-product, the white paper identifies no such by-product, biological WMD, or biological WMD culture process. If there were a tell-tale gaseous by-product, simple combustion would destroy it, just as drawing crankcase vapors into the intake manifold of a car destroys those vapors. It isn't biological WMD processes that create indestructible tell-tale by-products, it's nuclear ones. It's a fable spun by a non-technical person whose main skill appears to be twisting facts to fit a story."

"I think the white paper even claims that the fact the trailers had recently been repainted was evidence of efforts to conceal use of the trailers for WMD culture," concluded Spencer. "If there was such evidence, the paint would cover and preserve the evidence. Scratch it off and do an analysis. That, too, is glossed over. It's a cooked story, created by a non-technical person. It's indefensible. There's literally no evidence to back it up, no evidence for the cooling unit fable, no evidence for the compressor and gas bottle fable. Not only did the CIA issue a very unusual report to the people, something very rare for the CIA to do, the report contains completely unsupported clams. Who can possibly claim that the CIA did that on their own, with no pressure applied?"

I got a funny note from a truthout reader the other day that covers a similar situation. The reader observed something amusing about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the so-called "source" who claimed that Iraq was hosting al Qaeda terrorists. His information was used by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and the rest of them to justify the invasion, even though the Defense Intelligence Agency warned them that al-Libi was lying through his teeth. It turns out, in fact, that al-Libi was indeed crafting extravagant lies about al Qaeda in Iraq out of whole cloth, and eventually recanted all of his testimony in 2004.

So here's the funny part the truthout reader came up with. If you sound out the name Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi in just the right way, it sounds an awful lot like "I've been a shaky alibi." Indeed, he was.

It seems we can lump Mr. Shaky Alibi in with this report on the Winnebagoes of Death. You've got to love serendipity.

:hi:

recommended!

It's called selling ideas to venture capitalists and corporate boards.

Go Will Pitt!! The Winnebago is actually a GOP driven/operated crow cooking plant/roach coach for pukes!!

* on edit.....NOMINATED!!

they were in different countries.

Pay no attention to those weather balloon filling trucks in the other country!!

Both men went ahead with this bogus report to please the Bush Regime.

Too true to be funny.

who noticed how odd that name was. It can't possibly be real.