Guest Post By Seth Ackerman

I'm very happy to present a guest post below by Seth Ackerman on the new Washington Post story about the supposed "bio-labs" found in Iraq. Impressively enough, it turns out the post-war WMD lies were just as vigorous as the pre-war WMD lies.

You've probably seen Seth's writing before in Harper's, Mother Jones, and FAIR's Extra! Now a graduate student in history, he's one of the most knowledgeable people there is on the Iraq-WMD issue. In particular, you can't understand what happened without reading his 2004 article "A Legacy of Lies."

Please give him a warm welcome, and he may be willing to return.

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by Seth Ackerman

Today's Washington Post is reporting that a secret team of Pentagon inspectors concluded way back in May 2003 that the briefly famous Iraqi "bio-weapons trailers" were in fact nothing of the kind. As you'll recall, the Bush administration responded by immediately calling a press conference to admit that they were wrong.

Sorry, I mean they immediately buried the inspectors' report and then spent the next six months lying about the trailers.

The day after the Pentagon team's findings were transmitted to Washington, the CIA released a white paper on its website insisting, as the Post puts it, "that U.S. officials were 'confident' that the trailers were used for 'mobile biological weapons production.'" Then,

Throughout the summer and fall of 2003, the trailers became simply "mobile biological laboratories" in speeches and press statements by administration officials. In late June, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell declared that the "confidence level is increasing" that the trailers were intended for biowarfare. In September, Vice President Cheney pronounced the trailers to be "mobile biological facilities," and said they could have been used to produce anthrax or smallpox.

It wasn't until David Kay released the final Iraq Survey Group report in September 2004 -- which he summarized in Congressional testimony with the deliciously satisfying sentence, "It turns out we were all wrong" -- that the administration finally admitted the trailers were actually intended for making weather balloons (no, I'm serious).

But my favorite part of the Post article is where reporter Joby Warrick quotes Kay:

Kay said he was not apprised of the technical team's findings until late 2003, near the end of his time as the group's leader. "If I had known that we had such a team in Iraq," Kay said, "I would certainly have given their findings more weight."

Now, what makes this funny to me is this. Despite being forced to finally tell the truth in the end, Kay was hardly a good guy in the WMD saga. In the run-up to the war, he became one of those As-Seen-On-TV celebrity weapons inspectors. He was constantly on the news telling us how *terrifyingly huge* Saddam's schlong -- I mean *arsenal* -- was. Of course, it's true, there were a lot of ex-inspectors on TV back then. And a lot of them were talking about Saddam's huge, veiny arsenal. But Kay was one of the most gung-ho. He always used the latest talking points. It was clear that he was on the team. That's why the administration eventually picked him to lead the investigation.

So here's the thing. When the war ended and the weapons hunt started, Kay was an official "NBC News Analyst," always on call in case a big, throbbing cache of WMD was discovered. In May 2003, when they first found the trailers, Kay raced to Baghdad, where NBC's Baghdad correspondent Jim Avila filmed him triumphantly standing in front of the trailers with a pointer:

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.

Mr. KAY: Literally, there's nothing else you would do this way on a mobile facility. It is it.

Kay was in fact pointing at a giant weather-balloon machine.

It's hard to know what to say about this whole story. One thing I'd note is that when the administration announced the discovery of the trailers, UNMOVIC immediately asked for permission to inspect them -- they were still legally mandated to oversee Iraq's disarmament -- but the administration refused. Yet David Kay and his NBC cameras managed to get permission. Somehow I suspect he regrets that now.