there has been some noise in the US press around the WMD issue..

On Sunday, Condoleezza Rice admitted that President Bush had used a forged document in his State of the Union speech to prove Iraq represented a nuclear threat: "We did not know at the time--maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency--but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course it was information that was mistaken."

United Nations inspectors, belatedly presented with the same document, realized within hours it was a crude forgery. While this garbage and much else like it got rushed into the light, the Bush Administration protected its continuing lie about a connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein by repressing the results of interrogations of captured top Al Qaeda leaders.

Keeping secret any information that contradicted the pro-war line of the Administration allowed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to fabricate what he called a "bulletproof" connection between Al Qaeda and Hussein. We were expected to believe that our government had hard, definitive intelligence we couldn't be shown--just as we were told to trust that UN inspectors wouldn't be able to find all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in time to avert disaster.

Thus, with the pattern established, it was not surprising last week to read in the Los Angeles Times of a leaked report from the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency--secret since its completion last September--that indicated the depth of our government's confusion as to the nature of the Iraq WMD threat. The report stated that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities," according to US officials interviewed by the Times. Yet that very month, Rumsfeld told Congress that Hussein's "regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas."

Only last week, on his trip to Europe, he pointed to two mobile trailers the United States had seized in Iraq as proof of Iraq's threatening WMD program. Yet, as emerged over the weekend in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, Bush's claims rest on intelligence that is again unable to withstand scrutiny: Some leading weapons experts summoned by the Administration to make the case for the ominous trailers take issue with the Bush Administration's interpretation of their design and use.

On Saturday, the New York Times, which had originally hyped the trailer story based on official US sources, published a front-page report quoting experts who repudiated the Administration's claims. One such expert went so far as to say the government's "white paper" on the labs "was a rushed job and looks political." Others questioned myriad technical claims and suppositions in the report that led to the government's conclusion that the trailers were germ labs that could be used to cook up anthrax or other bioweapons. "It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," one top US scientist told the New York Times. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that's true of any tin can."

On Sunday, the London Observer, citing British intelligence sources, reported that it "is increasingly likely that the units were designed to be used for hydrogen production to fill artillery balloons, part of a system originally sold to Saddam by Britain in 1987."

[also,]

According to the report, the draft contained such questionable material that Powell lost his temper, throwing several pages in the air and declaring, "I'm not reading this. This is bullshit."

Cheney's aides wanted Powell to include in his presentation information that Iraq has purchased computer software that would allow it to plan an attack on the United States, an allegation that was not supported by the CIA, US News reported. The White House also pressed Powell to include charges that the suspected leader of the September 11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer prior to the attacks, despite a refusal by US and European intelligence agencies to confirm the meeting, the magazine said.

The pressure forced Powell to appoint his own review team that met several times with Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to prepare the speech, in which the secretary of state accused Iraq of hiding tonnes of biological and chemical weapons. US News [AFP] also said that the Defense Intelligence Agency had issued a classified assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program last September, arguing that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons."