Trucks Could Be Linked to Iraq Bioweapons

WASHINGTON - The discovery of two Iraqi truck trailers equipped with fermenters is the strongest evidence yet that Saddam Hussein had a biological weapons program, a U.S. intelligence report said Wednesday. But officials still have found no such weapons.

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"Examination of the trailers reveals ... an ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system," the report says. "Both trailers we have found probably are designed to produce BW agent in unconcentrated liquid slurry."

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There is no evidence the two trailers were ever actually used to make biological weapons, the intelligence officials said. Officials also said they did not expect to find biological agents inside the trucks, which they said the Iraqis probably had decontaminated.

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Intelligence officials who briefed reporters Wednesday on condition of anonymity, said they had considered and discarded possible legitimate uses for the trailers, ranging from the production of hydrogen to pesticides. The trucks would not be able to do any of those very well, they indicated.


"The Iraqis had a motivation to inefficiently produce a biological agent," said one intelligence official. "They had no motivation to inefficiently produce anything else."

Captured Iraqi scientists have said the vehicles were for producing hydrogen for weather balloons in support of artillery. The report acknowledges the trailers could be used to make hydrogen but says the effort would be inefficient compared with widely available commercial hydrogen generation systems.

A technical analysis of the trucks showed they could be used, though inefficiently, to complete the early steps of creating a biological weapon, intelligence officials said. Based on information from the source, they believe each truck was part of a two-truck or three-truck system that could create a finished agent.

Ingeniously simple, but inefficient. And just a bit more efficient than "producing hydrogen for weather balloons in support of artillery." And why would you scrub a weapons lab clean, but leave the lab? Wouldn't it be easier to torch it and leave NO evidence behind? Isn't that simpler? But those damn dirty Arabs, always leaving highly important documents, labs, etc just lying around.