Former inspector says politics quelled findings

The biological weapons specialist discusses the events in his memoirs.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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."
Barton, an Australian biological weapons specialist, discusses the 2004 events in "The Weapons Detective," a memoir of his years as an arms inspector, being published Monday in Australia by Black Inc. Agenda.
Expert in field
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.
Barton's memoir says that well into 2004, pressure from Washington kept the U.S. public uninformed about the true nature of these alleged WMD systems.
Former senior CIA officials denied such information was stifled.
Mobile biolabs
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.
In April 2003, however, two unusually equipped trailers were found in Iraq and the CIA declared they were the mobile biolabs described by the defector.
This story quickly fell apart behind the scenes, it has since emerged. 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.
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