"[The false claimant], according to Plato, is the 'sophist', the buffoon, centaur or satyr who lays claim to everything, and who, in laying
such claims to everything, is never grounded but contradicts everything, including himself…"-- Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze
February 5, 2003 U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the U.N. Security Council.
Powell presents evidence of "mobile production facilities for biological agents" as center-piece of evidence in favor of invasion
March 20, 2003 U.S. invades Iraq
May 13, 2003 New York Times article suggests the trailers were actually used to produce agricultural pesticides
May 27, 2003 The so-called "Jefferson Project", a Pentagon-sponsored, secret fact-finding mission to Iraq, transmits unanimous findings
to Washington in a brief field report. "The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- scientists and engineers with
extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons -- who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense
Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers." *
Report transmitted two days prior to President Bush statement, in which he states that weapons of mass destruction have been found in
Iraq.
May 28, 2003 CIA & Defense Intelligence Agency released a report (the so-called 'white paper') in which they produced evidence of an
Iraqi mobile biological weapons plant. In this report they released photographs of two trailers found in April near Mosul.
May 29, 2003 "50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers
captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the
weapons of mass destruction." *
June 2, 2003 The fact that American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence were disputing the claims
included in the C.I.A. white paper
June 19, 2003 122 page final report released by the same team of nine British & American technical experts confirming findings of 3 page
May 27, 2003 report.
Report, titled, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remains
classified today.
August 9, 2003 Engineering experts from the Defense Intelligence Agency have come to believe that the most likely use for two
mysterious trailers found in Iraq was to produce hydrogen for weather balloons rather than to make biological weapons, government
officials say. **
October 2, 2003 David Kay, leader of Iraqi Survey group, or "Jefferson Project" team, addresses congress, reporting that, "…he had found
no banned weapons in Iraq and was unable to verify the claim that the disputed trailers were weapons labs." *
April 2, 2004 Colin Powell acknowledges for the first time that principle charges he made in the speech to the United Nations, that Iraq
had mobile weapons laboratories, were based on erroneous information.
February 5, 2004 In a speech, "then-CIA Director George J. Tenet continued to assert that the mobile-labs theory remained plausible." *
September 4, 2004 "Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The survey group's final
report in September 2004 -- 15 months after the technical report was written -- said the trailers were "impractical" for biological weapons
production and were "almost certainly intended" for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons." *
November 15, 2004 Colin Powell resigns as US secretary of state.
June 16, 2007 Colin Powell's truck "reappears" in a darkened room in Kassel, Germany as part of Documenta 12.
Endnote:
It has been revealed that primary intelligence source, code name Curveball, used by the CIA for evidence of the Iraqi mobile biological
weapons truck was a self-proclaimed chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999 and requested asylum. Curveball provided
descriptions of mobile labs to the CIA indirectly, through Germany's intelligence service, and his detailed descriptions helped CIA artists
create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N. Security
Council.
* from The Washington Post, Warrick, Joby; "Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War"; April 12, 2006
**from the New York Times