The US/Iraq: The CIA has published a detailed assessment of two mysterious trailers found in northern Iraq, and has concluded that they provide the "strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare programme".Conor O'Clery North America Editor reports
Nevertheless officials of the intelligence agency acknowledged they still lacked hard proof and that no biological warfare material such as pathogens were found on the vehicles.
The CIA analysis was published as the Bush administration found itself under growing pressure from Congress to explain why no weapons of mass destruction have been found in the seven weeks since the fall of Baghdad.
The House intelligence committee has asked CIA director Mr George Tenet to review the intelligence underlying the categorical claims made since last August by US officials, including President George Bush, that Saddam Hussein had a banned weapons programme.
Having used the alleged presence of unconventional weapons to make the case for war, the same officials have begun to lower expectations that they will be found any time soon, suggesting instead that they were destroyed, hidden or taken out of the country.
On Tuesday US Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld said the Iraqis "may have had time to destroy them", and yesterday his deputy Mr Paul Wolfowitz told the Washington Post "no one should expect this kind of deception effort to get penetrated overnight". The CIA claimed the design of the trailers was consistent with intelligence from four Iraqi sources cited by US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell in his February 5th presentation to the UN to generate support for invading Iraq - in particular a chemical engineer who said he managed one of the mobile plants.
Mr Powell told the UN Iraq had 18 mobile units "that we know of", that were very sophisticated, and that they "can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin". The trailers found by US forces were "strikingly similar" in design, equipment and layout to the units described by the chemical engineer, the CIA said in its six-page assessment.
In a briefing about the two laboratory vehicles given by four intelligence agents on Wednesday, it was claimed they could brew enough germs to produce up to two kilogrammes of banned agents a month, sufficient to make lethal weapons.
The officials also said however the equipment on the trailers found in Iraq was rusty and the mobile units were poorly maintained. One official told the New York Times Iraqi scientists would have difficulty getting raw materials into the production equipment and extracting killer germs.
The published CIA assessment recounted that senior Iraqi officials who were shown pictures of the trailers said they were used to chemically produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons.
The CIA dismissed this as a cover story and said it could not find any legitimate industrial use for the trailers, but conceded that some of the features were consistent with manufacturing hydrogen. The US government has barred for now the return to Iraq of UN weapons inspectors who could provide an independent assessment of the mobile laboratories.
Despite the CIA reservations, White House spokesman Mr Ari Fleischer yesterday hailed the discovery of the trailers as absolute proof that US intelligence was right about Iraq having unconventional weapons.
"I think that's borne out by the fact that, just as Secretary Powell described at the United Nations, we have found the bio-trucks that can be used only for the purpose of producing biological weapons," he told reporters.