Efforts to prop up a story about mobile weapons labs in Iraq continue, for a short time. This one is even more absurd than the story about aluminum tubes or the one about an Iraq-Niger uranium deal. Another future scandal also continues to develop around this time, leading eventually to the alleged destruction of CIA videotapes showing the torture of two prisoners detained in connection with the USS Cole bombing.
May 9-14, 2003:

 

May 9, 2003 -- Judge Leonie Brinkema, in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., asks whether the interrogations of detainees are being recorded in any format. Attorneys for the DOJ, passing along answer from CIA, say no.

 

May 11, 2003 – Try, try again. The New York Times runs another Judith Miller article about those trailers:
 

“A team of experts searching for evidence of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq has concluded that a trailer found near Mosul in northern Iraq in April is a mobile biological weapons laboratory, the three team members said today. 

       Describing their four-day examination of the lab for the first time and on the condition of anonymity, the members of the Chemical Biological Intelligence Support Team-Charlie, or Team Charlie, said they had based their conclusion on a thorough examination of the gray-green trailer, with the help of British experts and a few American soldiers.              

       The members acknowledged that some experts were still uncertain whether the trailer was intended to produce biological agents. But they said they were persuaded that it was a mobile lab for biological production.” (“AFTEREFFECTS: THE HUNT FOR EVIDENCE; Trailer is a Mobile Lab Capable of Turning Out Bioweapons, a Team Says,” A12)     

 

Same day -- NBC Nightly News picks up the dubious story:

“JOHN SEIGENTHALER, anchor:

After years of searching, there is new evidence tonight that Saddam Hussein's regime was capable of building weapons of mass destruction. Tonight, an NBC news team has exclusive video of what authorities believe is a mobile bioweapons lab. It's one of three trailers found by US forces that experts believe could have been used to produce deadly germs. NBC's Jim Avila reports.

JIM AVILA reporting:

Military weapons experts on scene in Iraq tell NBC News this looted trailer is a mobile biological weapons laboratory, and the most significant weapons of mass destruction find to date.

Major PAUL HALDERMAN: We turned that corner, and we all looked over at the same time and said, yes. There it is.

AVILA: The lab discovered by soldiers from the Army's 101st Airborne just outside the gates of a huge rocket and missile plant near Mosul in northern Iraq is equipped, according to chemical officer Major Paul Halderman, to make bioweapons, including dry anthrax.

Maj. HALDERMAN: It connects the pieces for everybody. It really does. It kind of completes the circle.”

 

If NBC had pursued the Joseph Wilson thread in the Kristof article, rather than eagerly grasping at a red herring tossed out by the administration at this point, much damage might have been prevented.

 

May 12, 2003 – NBC Nightly News eagerly follows through again on the ‘mobile labs’:

“JIM AVILA reporting:

A key arrest in Baghdad: Iraq's first lady of biological warfare so tied to Saddam Hussein's military disease program she was dubbed Dr. Germ. Rihab Taha, now in US custody. Unlike Mrs. Anthrax, Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, arrested a week ago, Dr. Germ is not on the most wanted list. But both women are believed to have inside knowledge about alleged weapons of mass destruction, including this abandoned and looted trailer found by the 101st Airborne next to a missile factory. Military experts say this lab and two others like it may be the most significant WMD findings of the war.

Major PAUL HALDELMAN (US Army 101st Airman): There it is. We--we turned the corner and, 'Wow.'

AVILA: A mobile lab capable of manufacturing anthrax or botulism from the back of a truck, with equipment manufactured as late as 2003. Former UN Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay, now an NBC News analyst, went over the lab firsthand.

Mr. DAVID KAY: This is a compressor. You want to keep the fermentation process under pressure so it goes faster. This vessel is the fermenter. You took the nutrients--think of it as sort of the chicken soup for biological weapons. You mixed it with the seed stock, which came from this gravity flow tank up here into the fermenter. And under pressure with heat, it fermented.

AVILA: The other two mobile labs are secured here at the Baghdad Airport. They're said to be in better condition. Military intelligence officers have visited the factory where they're made and now believe there are eight mobile labs in country. Military inspectors say these labs look very similar to those in the UN presentation made by Colin Powell before the war. And according to Kay, any claims they had any legitimate use makes little sense.”

 

May 15, 2003 – Two indictments are won by the Bush DOJ in the USS Cole case. Attorney General Ashcroft at last indicts, in absentia, Fahd Al Quso and Jamal Mohammad Al Bawdi, who have escaped from a Yemeni prison and are no longer officially in the custody of Yemen. The Department of Justice flies some relatives of Cole victims to D.C. to watch the announcement. Yemen does not extradite its citizens to stand trial in other countries.
 

The escape and the lack of extradition mean, as a reader of mine points out, that the administration avoids a messy trial of these alleged culprits lasting into election year 2004. One question still unanswered as of 2008 is–who had custody of or was protecting these two fugitives for the next 10 months, until they were recaptured?