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Op-ed: Of mice and mountains

Brian Cloughley

The trailers that Bush, Cheney and Powell continue to claim as ‘mobile biological facilities’ were examined thoroughly by Kay’s experts. They turned them inside out for months

“One day the Countrymen noticed that the Mountains were in labour; smoke came out of their summits, the earth was quaking at their feet, trees were crashing, and huge rocks were tumbling. They felt sure that something horrible was going to happen. They all gathered together to see what terrible thing this could be. They waited and they waited, but nothing came. At last there was a still more violent earthquake, and a huge gap appeared in the side of the Mountains. They all fell down upon their knees and waited. At last, and at last, a teeny, tiny mouse poked its little head and bristles out of the gap and came running down towards them, and ever after they used to say: ‘Much outcry, little outcome’.”

As in this tale from Aesop’s Fables, so with the much-trumpeted report concerning Iraq’s strangely elusive weapons of mass destruction. The mountain of scrutiny, having laboured mightily, gave forth a teeny tiny mouse. The Sherlock Holmes of rummage in Iraq, David Kay, spent 300 million dollars of US taxpayers’ money supervising 1200 investigators and enough gadgetry to detect a mouse at a million metres and concluded “We have not found at this point actual weapons. It does not mean we’ve concluded there are no actual weapons. It means at this point in time — and it’s a huge country with a lot to do — that we have not yet found weapons.” He is being given another 600 million dollars to find them.

Thanks very much Dr Kay. We understand your message, unlike the media owned by Murdoch and a fellow called Black who runs London’s (Bush) Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post. Their employees are required to rehash the histrionics of the Washington wizards who assure us that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are really really there, and even if they are not there they might have appeared in years to come, maybe; and even if they didn’t... well... our reasons for invading and destroying Iraq were Good and you people who say we went to war illegally are stupid, so Get Lost because We Know Better.

On 29 May Bush announced on Polish television that “We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. 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, they’re wrong, we found them.” This bizarre and deliberate falsehood was contradicted by — of all people — Bush’s appointee, Dr Kay, who on December 20, 2002 had told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that “Washington should pursue regime change. Containment is a failed policy, and inspections are unlikely to lead to Iraq’s disarmament. Only regime change is likely to result in the discovery and destruction of Iraq’s WMD.”

If there was anyone who could be expected to try to save the face of the Bush administration it would be David Kay. The man who appointed him declared Iraq undoubtedly possessed ‘mobile labs to build biological weapons’, but Kay told Congress “We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile biological weapons production effort”. Yet on ‘Meet the Press’ on September 14, vice-president Cheney stated “There were at least seven of these mobile labs.... We’ve... found two of them. They’re in our possession today, mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox or whatever else.” (This is strongly disputed by independent scientists.)

The trailers that Bush, Cheney and Powell continue to claim as ‘mobile biological facilities’ were examined thoroughly by Kay’s experts. They turned them inside out for months and would have bent over backwards to support claims by the president and his minions that they could produce biological agents. But they could not prove any such thing. All they found was a single vial of botulism-related material that had been in a scientist’s house refrigerator since 1993.

On July 15 Kay showed pictures of the trailers on NBC and stated ‘I’ve already seen enough to convince me’ of their use as biological facilities; but Associated Press on October 3 reported his admission that “On the basis of technical analysis on the two [trailers] that we have, it is not going to be possible to reach a determination.” The origin of these trailers is intriguing. They were sold to Iraq by a British company that, oddly, has not been ordered by the British government to reveal their purpose. Export certificates for weapons’-related materiel from Britain are required by law and, according to Mark Pythian in ‘The Politics of British Arms Sales Since 1964’ (Manchester University Press), in 1992 ‘a flood of documents’ revealed the sleazy ins and outs of supplies to Iraq in the eighties.

If the Blair government wanted the facts about these trailers to be known it could do so within 24 hours — providing it hasn’t had the documents shredded, of course. It appears their purpose was to fill and despatch meteorological balloons, track them, and monitor the basic instruments they carry. Such equipment can be seen on any artillery range. Claims that canvas-sided trailers subject to uncontrollable variations in temperature might be biological agent factories are simply not credible.

The most dramatic lie came from Bush on October 7 last year. It was intended to sway the American people to support his forthcoming war, especially the generation that had lived through the years when the former Soviet Union’s rockets were an ever-present threat. He declared ‘Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program’ and evoked the possibility of ‘mushroom clouds’. Then Cheney contradicted and ridiculed the UN’s senior nuclear expert, Dr ElBaradei. On NBC on March 16 Cheney said “we believe he [Saddam Hussein] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr El Baradei frankly is wrong.”

But Kay reported “we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material” and “It clearly does not look like a massive, resurgent program, based on what we discovered.” Most of us knew this already, of course, because we were told it by reliable, honourable people like Dr ElBaradei. Can we expect admissions from Bush and Cheney that they told lies? Do mice turn into mountains?

Brian Cloughley is a former military officer who writes on international affairs. His website is www.briancloughley.com

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