Inspector: Politics stunted 'biotrailer' findings

By The Associated Press

05/15/06 "Register-Guard" -- -- A year after Bush administration claims about Iraqi ''bioweapons trailers'' were discredited by American experts, U.S. officials were still suppressing the findings, according to a senior member of the CIA-led inspection team.

At one point, former U.N. arms inspector Rod Barton says, a CIA officer told him it was ''politically not possible'' to report that the White House claims were untrue. In the end, Barton says, he felt ''complicit in deceit.''

Barton, an Australian biological weapons specialist, discusses the 2004 events in ''The Weapons Detective,'' a memoir of his years as an arms inspector, being published Monday in Australia.

Much sought after for his expertise, Barton served on the U.N. Iraq arms inspection teams of 1991-98 and 2002-03. After the U.S. invasion, he was an aide to chief U.S. inspector Charles Duelfer.

The Washington Post reported last month that a U.S. fact-finding mission confidentially advised Washington on May 27, 2003, that two trailers found in Iraq were not mobile units for making bioweapons, as had been suspected.

Two days later, President Bush still asserted the trailers were bioweapons labs, and other officials repeated that line for months afterward.

Copyright © 2006 — The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

Click below to read or post comments on this article

|