From McG's article (you just
have to love the whiny tone):
Quote:Much has been made of the fact that an intelligence claim about Iraq's effort to acquire uranium from Africa proved to be erroneous. But few people seem to have noticed when the intelligence was correct.
Last September the British WMD dossier pointed to the fact that Iraq was producing missiles beyond range limits imposed by the UN.
That was validated in March by UNMOVIC, the UN's monitoring, verification and inspection commission when it declared that Iraq's Al-Samoud missiles to be proscribed.
A trailer found since the conflict has been assessed by US and British specialists to be a mobile biological weapons laboratory. This matches intelligence provided by the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to the UN in December.
Now, this sounds like a serious accusation, when in fact it isn't. The article's talking about the Al-Samoud missile. Iraq was allowed to own missiles with a range up to 150km (or 93 miles). However, UNMOVIC experts said that these missiles had a range of up to 180km (111 miles). Without a payload. There was discussion over whether the missiles
including payloads would fall within the allowed range, but in the end Iraq agreed on their destruction.
10 missiles were destroyed under UNMOVIC supervision, but the invasion of Iraq interrupted Iraq's destruction of the remainder.
The trailer the article talks about was hailed as proof that Iraq had indeed been using mobile biological weapons laboratories. That's obviously what people wanted to believe, and it prompted
President Bush to claim:
Quote:We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them.
That sounded nice, but was wrong. Scott Ritter admitted that, when he later said:
Quote:The discovery by U.S. forces in Iraq of two mobile 'biological weapons laboratories' was touted by President Bush as clear evidence that Iraq possessed illegal weapons capabilities. However, it now is clear that these so-called labs were nothing more than hydrogen generation units based upon British technology acquired by Iraq in the 1980s, used to fill weather balloons in support of conventional artillery operations, and have absolutely no application for the production of biological agents.
