88^th in continuing blog series on the administration push to war. As May 2003 wends on, the story of the mobile weapons laboratories in Iraq—trailers—gradually peters out. Meanwhile, the race for lucrative contracts for Iraq reconstruction intensifies.
May 19-26, 2003:

 
May 19, 2003 – White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer announces that he will be leaving. He will be replaced by Deputy Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

May 21, 2003 – The New York Times follows the lead on the trailers, up to a point:

“United States intelligence agencies have concluded that two mysterious trailers found in Iraq were mobile units to produce germs for weapons, but they have found neither biological agents nor evidence that the equipment was used to make such arms, according to senior administration officials.   

       The officials said intelligence analysts in Washington and Baghdad reached their conclusion about the trailers after analyzing, and rejecting, alternative theories of how they could have been used. Their consensus was in a paper presented to the White House late Monday.” (“AFTEREFFECTS: GERM WEAPONS; U.S. Analysts Link Iraq Labs To Germ Arms,” William Broad and Judith Miller, front page)

 
The Times is taking little baby steps in the right direction here: Those ‘mobile weapons labs’ are just trailers.

May 22, 2003 – The U.N. Security Council votes to lift sanctions on Iraq. Bush praises the vote in a statement--his first statement on Iraq in two weeks--without mentioning Saddam or WMD.
 

Had the sanctions been lifted in the 1990s or at the beginning of the Bush term, the Iraqi people would have been in a stronger position to deal with Saddam Hussein.

Same day -- The U.N. Security Council passes a resolution directing the proceeds from Iraqi oil to be placed in a Development Fund for Iraq. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is given authority to control the fund and to choose contractors.

 
During the year that the CPA has this authority, the Iraqi Development Fund receives $20.2 billion, including $8.1 billion from the U.N. oil-for-food program and $10.8 billion from Iraqi oil. A report released by the House Government Reform Committee in February 2007 shows that from May 2003 to June 2004 the Federal Reserve Bank in New York ships almost $12 billion to Iraq.

May 23, 2003 – Another new company, this one named Nour USA, Ltd, is formed in the Washington, D.C., suburbs of northern Virginia. Nour USA will soon become embroiled in controversy, partly by winning a multi-million-dollar contract for equipping troops and Iraqi forces in Iraq with everything from uniforms to vehicles. Nour USA is connected both with controversial Iraqi exile figure Ahmad Chalabi and with a group of companies also linked to the president’s brother Marvin P. Bush.

May 26, 2003 – The Washington Post runs an article in its Style section that partly exposes connections between the saga of Iraqi WMD and the questionable authority of exile Iraqi leader Ahmad Chalabi:

“A dustup between two New York Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper's coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein.   

       An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is close to top Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?        

       The Chalabi connection surfaced when John Burns, the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning Baghdad bureau chief, scolded Miller over her May 1 story on the Iraqi without clearing it with him.”
(“Intra-Times Battle Over Iraqi Weapons,” C1)

    
Miller is quoted in the article as saying by email that Chalabi “has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.” She also says she has been covering him for ten years. In other words, it is now openly admitted that one major ‘source’ for the New York Times of several of the bogus ‘intelligence’ items used by the White House as justification for war with Iraq was Chalabi, previously affiliated with neocons inside and outside the administration seeking war. The ‘intelligence streams’ used as the basis for war arguments were a closed circuit, used by the New York Times to produce reports that frequently appeared on its front page.