The Bush administration yesterday made public its assessment of two mysterious trailers found in Iraq, calling them mobile units to produce deadly germs and the strongest evidence yet that Saddam Hussein had been hiding a program to prepare for biological warfare......<snip>.....The Central Intelligence Agency posted the six-page assessment, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," on its Web site,
www.cia.gov. The analysis was done in collaboration with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The report and briefing, given by four intelligence officials, revealed new details beyond what government officials had previously disclosed about the two mobile factories found by allied forces in April and May.......<snip>...... The report called the discovery of the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." It also noted that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in his testimony before the United Nations on Feb. 5 to generate support for a war in Iraq, had detailed such charges.
Both the report and the briefing, a telephone conference call in which reporters asked questions, were careful and candid. Both had notable caveats, including the use of the words "probable" and "unlikely."
Both conceded that there were inconsistencies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof, like the presence of pathogens in trailer gear. The officials acknowledged that they had discovered neither biological agents nor evidence that the equipment had ever been used to make germ weapons.
Moreover, they said the trailer's hardware presented no direct evidence of weapons use. The best evidence of that, they said, was the trailers' close resemblance to prewar descriptions of mobile germ plants given by Iraqi sources.
A technical assessment alone "would not lead you intuitively and logically to biological warfare," an official said of the trailers.
Their gear was rusty, officials said, perhaps from sitting in the rain. And the mobile factories were poorly designed. For instance, one official noted, Iraqi biologists running the plants would have had a hard time getting raw materials into the production gear and removing multiplied colonies of deadly germs.
"Relatively inefficient but ingenious" is how one analyst described the mobile factories.
Their inefficiency, he added, was probably rooted in a decision to design the plants with enough technical ambiguity so they could be disclaimed as germ factories if discovered. Iraqi scientists have said the units were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. But the intelligence officials dismissed that explanation as a cover story even while conceding that the equipment could, in fact, have been used occasionally to make hydrogen......<snip>.......The report took issue with an editorial in The New York Times on May 13 that cited experts who had suggested that the trailers might have been meant to produce biopesticides or to refurbish missile fuel. Those explanations, it said, made no sense.
A skeptical view of the evidence presented yesterday came from Matthew S. Meselson, a Harvard expert on biological weapons who has advised the Central Intelligence Agency. He said the C.I.A. had made technical errors in the past and called on the government to turn over its Iraqi evidence to an independent panel.
Dr. Meselson suggested that an appropriate group might be the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious organization in Washington that often advises the government.
