FAS

A Postscript on Mobile Iraqi BW Labs

08.14.06 | 1 min read | Text by Steven Aftergood

Did U.S. intelligence analysts actually “replicate” the mobile biological weapons laboratories that were supposedly deployed by Saddam Hussein, as stated in the Silberman-Robb Commission report?

Arms control expert Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland posed this question earlier this year.

Based on his own investigations, he has now concluded that there was no such replication of the supposed mobile BW labs.

“No mock-up containing the pieces of equipment shown in the drawings appears to have been produced, and no biological agent or simulant was produced.”

“Apparently the drawings [used in Secretary Powell’s 2003 UN presentation] were all that was ever prepared.”

“These self-conceived and self-imagined illustrations were all the ‘evidence’ that the United States government had to give to Secretary of State Powell to place before the United Nations and the world to support the claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapon production platforms…,” Dr. Leitenberg wrote.

See “Further Information Regarding US Government Attribution of a Mobile Biological Production Capacity by Iraq” by Milton Leitenberg, August 2006.

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