And compromise the separation between the news and the op-ed page?

"that story has ALREADY been debunked as a complete fraud."

Complete nonsense, of course. The Adminsitration states as fact that these were mobile labs. Which was obviously wrong, as the story (which needless to say the hacktacular Captain leaves out) goes on to say:

The trailers discovered in the Iraqi desert resembled the drawings well enough, at least from a distance. One of them, a flatbed trailer covered by tarps, was found in April by Kurdish fighters near the northern city of Irbil. The second was captured by U.S. forces near Mosul. Both were painted military green and outfitted with a suspicious array of gear: large metal tanks, motors, compressors, pipes and valves.

Photos of the trailers were quickly circulated, and many weapons experts were convinced that the long-sought mobile labs had been found.

Yet reaction from Iraqi sources was troublingly inconsistent. Curveball, shown photos of the trailers, confirmed they were mobile labs and even pointed out key features. But other Iraqi informants in internal reports disputed Curveball's story and claimed the trailers had a benign purpose: producing hydrogen for weather balloons.

Back at the Pentagon, DIA officials attempted a quick resolution of the dispute. The task fell to the "Jefferson Project," a DIA-led initiative made up of government and civilian technical experts who specialize in analyzing and countering biological threats. Project leaders put together a team of volunteers, eight Americans and a Briton, each with at least a decade of experience in one of the essential technical skills needed for bioweapons production. The technical team went to work under a blistering sun in 110-degree temperatures. Using tools from home, they peered into vats, turned valves, tapped gauges and measured pipes. They reconstructed a flow-path through feed tanks and reactor vessels, past cooling chambers and drain valves, and into discharge tanks and exhaust pipes. They took hundreds of photographs.

By the end of their first day, team members still had differing views about what the trailers were. But they agreed about what the trailers were not.

"Within the first four hours," said one team member, who like the others spoke on the condition he not be named, "it was clear to everyone that these were not biological labs."

There's really nothing more pathetic than when Bush's lickspittles claim that the poor adminsitration was duped by the intelligence that it was tendentiously cherry-picking.

What you wrote is just a flat-out lie.

The CIA favored the reports of two teams that actually viewed the labs, and the Administration relied on that CIA judgement:

Intelligence analysts involved in high-level discussions about the trailers noted that the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs.

So, apparently, because the CIA believed those two teams who viewed the labs, rather than the team that headlines the WaPo story, Bush lied.

That doesn't even pass the laugh test.

BTW, scrolling thru his site, I see that Captain Ed ALSO points to another story that shows that Matthew's last post accusing Bush of lying was ALSO way off the mark!

It's got to tell you something when every post accusing Bush of lying turns out to be wrong. Every. Single. One.

I forgot the link to the editorial, which gives me a chance to say a few more words about it.

The subject of the piece is what Bush can do to rescue his Presidency. Here's their suggestions:

1. Actually do something about global warming.

2. To get behind "comprehensive, generous" immigration reform.

3. Become a champion of lobbying reform.

4. Do something real about poverty in the U.S..

5. End Iraq/GWoT detainee abuse.

I know you're ROFL by this point, but no, really - that's what the WaPo suggested!

I have no idea why they think Bush would be interested in doing any one of these things, but it sure goes to show just how out to lunch they are. Maybe they're still listening to recordings of his "compassionate conservative" and "reformer with results" talk from 2000. They sure haven't paid attention to what he's done while in the White House, and who it's helped, and who's been left out in the cold.

In effect, they're saying, "If Bush wasn't really Bush, but was some completely different person with completely different goals and motivations, he might do X, Y, and Z to save the rest of his Presidency."

The Washington Post editorials are getting to be quite the comic section.

But of course, the CIA was not "disregarding the evidence" - it was citing the evidence obtained by TWO teams that viewed the labs and that concluded that they were weapons labs. The only people who are disregarding the evidence are people like you who ignore those TWO other teams.

Of course there is NO evidence to support your assertion that the examinations done by two teams (which the CIA accepted) was "cursory".

I know, I know, expecting the "Reality-Based Community" to have actual evidence to support their assertions is really asking too much.

Note, the previous post makes the much bigger assumptions that:

1) the two teams of military experts are not the figments of the imagination of some administration hack.

2) the two military teams did not submit reports with enough qualifications and reservations to render the conclusions essentially meaningless without the same kind of cherry-picking the administratin has applied to all the other intelligence on WMD issues.

If either of those two assumptions fail, then the comparisons suggested in the previous post are unnecessary and the attempts by Al and others to defend the administration's handling of this issue fail again.

I really wish I had seen more detailed diagrams of the trailers. It was fairly obvious, rather quickly, that they were not facilities for making modern powdered biological weapons.

The first deployable, if minimally so, US biological weapon was tularemia (Franciscella tularensis). As opposed to later weaponized agents, the tularemia bombs were filled with a wet slurry of bacteria, and had about a 48-hour shelf life. The plan was to fly the agent from the factory in the US to the bomber base, and load the small bombs there.

This was more or less during the Korean War, where I always found the North Korean allegations of biological warfare a bit amusing, in that they described a very wide assortment of objects they claimed were used for delivering biological weapons, except the one distinctive bomb that was actually in the inventory.

So, I have to admit that the trailers, on the amount of detail released at the time, struck me as possibilities for producing agents, with an obsolete technology that needed to be as close as possible to the launchers. Still, I would not consider tularemia slurry weapons a justification for war; tularemia is a disabling but not horribly lethal disease.

Technical intelligence isn't always black and white.

Resorting to language such as licksplittle, whether the subjects are Bush staff or acolytes of Noam Chomsky, also is rather pathetic.