Thursday, April 13, 2006

What did the Senate know about the bogus mobile weapons trailers, and when did it know it?

Josh Marshall asks:

"When did the administration let Congress in on the fact that those mobile weapons labs weren't bio-weapons labs at all and that we'd just been conned by some emigres on the make?

We're focusing now on the president's flogging of this bogus story shortly after the Defense Intelligence Agency gave a definitive verdict on the falsity of the claim. But when did they tell Congress? And how late did other administration heavies continue to make this claim?

My recollection is that with most of these stories like the trailers and the tubes and the nuclear this and that, most of this stuff wasn't definitively knocked down for many, many months after the war. Like old soldiers these fables didn't die so much as they faded away. The certainty diminished. More doubts were raised. But for what always struck me as deeply cynical reasons, the White House never publicly pulled the plug on any of these tales because as long as they kept some level of uncertainty hanging in the air they didn't have to address the fact that the central argument for the war had turned out to be false.

Hell, you've still got Hitchens publicly holding out for the Niger canard. And that's just an example of the fact that you can always find folks deep enough in the tank to churn out tall tales for the true believers to eat up.

Anyway, when did the White House tell Congress that the mobile weapons story was bunk?

A reader pointed me toward this portion of the congressional record from July 17th, 2003 in which Senators Durbin and McConnell discuss then heated WMD debate. They both discuss the mobile bio-weapons trailers with the assumption that that was what they were. And this was the day after then CIA Director George Tenet gave five hours of closed door Senate testimony on the WMD debacle. That certainly suggests that Tenet didn't knock down the mobile lab fable in that lengthy session dedicated to the topic of pre-war WMD intelligence.

What does Durbin say? ..."

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