Spinsanity on Bush's WMD "find"

Spinsanity, a site that I've found is great for helping with clarifying the many distortions we're faced with, both from politicians and from the media covering them, has an entry about Bush's recent declaration that "We found the weapons of mass destruction."

In remarks to Polish television released on Friday, though, President Bush stated that the U.S. has found much more than these labs. "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," he said, according to an Associated Press article. "''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, we found them."

However, as the Washington Post piece states, "U.S. authorities have to date made no claim of a confirmed finding of an actual nuclear, biological or chemical weapon." The existence of the labs is an important but separate issue. In the midst of a debate about whether the U.S. government misled the public and other governments over its reasons for invading Iraq, the President is now making a patently false claim about evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

These mobile labs appear to be equipped in such a way that it's possible have been used to produce biological agents, but, as noted earlier, there are still many questions surrounding them and how feasible it would have been to use them for producing biological weapons. Among other issues, there was no trace of biological contamination found in either trailer, some experts question if it would have been possible for the trailers to maintain the kind of temperatures needed to grow biological agents, and there would have needed to be one, if not more, additional trailers that would have carried other equipment necessary to finish the process of making any biological agents useful as weapons.

Until it can be conclusively shown that these trailers were used for the production of biological agents, for anyone - especially the President - to claim that we have actually found weapons of mass destruction or biological laboratories is reckless at best. We have found laboratories that might be useable in biological weapons manufacturing. Maybe it could be said that we have found laboratories that were likely used in biological weapons manufacturing. But to say that we flat out have found WMD or biological laboratories is misleading at best.

Posted by thorswitch at June 4, 2003 04:42 PM | TrackBack