Allegations of Iraqi mobile weapons laboratories

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation before the United Nations showing a computer image of what were purported to be mobile weapons for creating biological agents.

Powell based the assertion on accounts of at least four Iraqi defectors, including a chemical engineer who supervised one of the facilities and been present during production runs of a biological agent.

In the CIA briefing days before the 2003 United Nations security council presentation Colin Powell knew that all information included in the report had to be solid.

[4] He claimed that after he had graduated at the top of his chemical engineering class at Baghdad University in 1994, he worked for "Dr. Germ," the pseudonym of British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha.

Furthermore, on June 26, 2006, the Washington Post reported that "the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels.

"[3] With information about the mobile labs the Bush administration then went and asked Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) if they knew anything about this "threat".

[6] Harith's was met by a DIA debriefer who concluded that it "seemed accurate, but much of it appeared embellished" and he apparently "had been coached on what information to provide."

However, the line about Harith being coached was removed and one that he passed a lie detector added and as such became official evidence of mobile bio-labs even being used by Bush in his January 2003 State of the Union message.

[8] May 27, 2003, a fact finding mission to Iraq sent its report to Washington unanimously declaring that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.

[13] June 5, 2003 Dr. David Kelly one of Britains foremost experts on Biological Weapons visited Iraq to examine the trailers and take photographs.