Judith Miller is a former reporter for The New York Times and author of four books on the Middle East, biological weapons and the Holocaust. For information on her prosecution for refusing to reveal sources to federal prosecutors, see the news section of this Web site or the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.



In this section:






Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War
by Judith Miller, William Broad, Stephen Engelberg
Simon & Schuster, 2001




God Has Ninety-Nine Names: A Reporter's Journey Through a Militant Middle East
by Judith Miller
Simon & Schuster, 1996




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Aftereffects: The Hunt for Evidence

New York Times, May 10, 2003

Trailer is a Mobile Lab Capable of Turning Out Bioweapons, a Team Says
By JUDITH MILLER

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 10

A team of experts searching for evidence of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq has concluded that a trailer found near Mosul in northern Iraq in April is a mobile biological weapons laboratory, the three team members said today.

Describing their four-day examination of the lab for the first time and on the condition of anonymity, the members of the Chemical Biological Intelligence Support Team-Charlie, or Team Charlie, said they had based their conclusion on a thorough examination of the gray-green trailer, with the help of British experts and a few American soldiers.

The members acknowledged that some experts were still uncertain whether the trailer was intended to produce biological agents. But they said they were persuaded that it was a mobile lab for biological production.

The team leader said that the lab contained equipment that could be used to make vaccines, drugs and other peaceful pathogens, as well as deadly germs for weapons, and that Iraq had therefore been obliged to disclose possession of such equipment to international inspectors before the war.

"The failure to disclose such equipment is a clear violation of United Nations sanctions and an indication of ill intent," said the team leader, a 20-year veteran of Special Operations forces and explosive ordnance work and a nuclear weapons expert.

He contended that this could be construed as the kind of "smoking gun" that his team was charged with finding to substantiate the Bush administration's allegations that Iraq was making biological and chemical weapons.

Other American experts say they believe that teams hunting for biological and chemical weapons may now have located parts of three mobile labs, military and civilian officials said today.

Those experts said that in addition to the Mosul trailer and another one found recently in northern Iraq, a smaller trailer was discovered last week by American forces near Baghdad. They said the smaller trailer, like the one near Mosul, had been taken to Baghdad International Airport for further examination.

The experts also said they believed that based on intelligence information, there might be as many as eight mobile labs in Iraq, adding that the locations of the other five have not yet been determined.

Some members of another team of weapons experts and intelligence officials arrived in Baghdad today to survey the labs at the airport and gather additional information about their operation and purpose. Pentagon officials sent the team to check the initial test results, and if they find they are accurate, to help assemble an ironclad technical case that would counter alternative, peaceful explanations for the trailers.

Some scientists say the trailers could have been used for peaceful purposes, like biopesticide production, but none of them have seen the labs or talked to the experts who reject such contentions.

All three Team Charlie members said they were certain that future tests would confirm that the trailer was evidence of a weapons program.

The team also said they had found a substance in the lab's fermenting machine, which they declined to identify. Officials in Washington, reached by telephone, said they believed that the team had found growth media that might have been used to culture germs. More lab tests on the samples are being conducted in the United States and Britain, which assisted Team Charlie in its examination, officials said.

The team also found that the lab had been cleaned with a "caustic agent" -- ammonia or bleach.

"We never expected to find positive samples" of pathogens, the team's biological specialist said. "But to prove that the lab could make biological agents, you don't need to find such agents."

The members of the team work for the Defense Intelligence Agency as part the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which has been responsible for the search for unconventional weapons. Team members said their investigation showed that the lab was partly assembled under the noses of international inspectors. A new inspection agency, known as the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission, returned to Iraq late last year after its predecessor agency was forced to leave the country in 1998. The agency conducted inspections in Iraq with many restrictions until just before the war.

The team's chemical expert, a 34-year-old former marine, said the team had found identification plates on equipment inside the trailer that "had dates from 2000 to 2002."

While most of the equipment in the lab was Iraqi in origin, some of it was from "foreign sources," the team leader said, describing it as "generic equipment that could have been easily ordered from several different places." The team declined to identify the countries that had supplied such equipment.

The members said another indication that the lab was part of a biological weapons program was an information plate found on a major piece of equipment from the Al Nasser Company, an Iraqi concern that had helped design and equip a major biological weapons plant destroyed after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.

The biological specialist said the equipment he took apart would support the production of peaceful germs, as well as those for weapons. But he said the presence of equipment to contain the emission of gasses from the trailer -- known informally as scrubbers -- indicated that the two to four people who may have operated the lab, including a driver, did not want traces of what they were making to be detectable.

"You don't need that kind of system if you're making a vaccine," he said. "You don't make baby formula on the road in a mobile van."

The team did not find any protective clothing or biocontainment system to safeguard the scientists or technicians who worked inside the trailer from exposure to deadly germs. But the team leader said he was not surprised by the absence of such equipment, which is standard in Western labs.

"We've already seen what a low regard for human life this regime had," the leader said.

He said the team had tried to eliminate other possible explanations for the lab. First, they discounted the possibility that the lab was intended to be a decoy. They also dismissed the possibility that it was a nuclear reactor on wheels, or that it held any other nuclear-related equipment. Also discounted was the theory that the lab was intended to produce missile fuel, propellant or explosives. The equipment was not appropriate for those functions, they said.

Finally, they considered the possibility that the lab was intended for chemical production.

"There are still some experts who think that," the team leader said. "And while we haven't totally ruled it out, the lack of glass, stainless steel, Teflon and other material that can withstand the corrosive effects of chemicals suggests that the purpose was bio."

The team said the only major piece of equipment that was made of stainless steel was the lab's fermenter. They said that much of the craftsmanship in the lab was crude, but that the equipment -- a fermenter, a system to bring in fresh water to and eliminate contaminated water from the trailer, and a water cooling system based on what appeared to be a jerry-built air conditioning unit -- was capable of making considerable amounts of pathogens in a relatively short time.

"It was a Rube Goldberg system, but it clearly would have worked," the team leader said. "And they continued making improvements to it."

The lab was mobile, the team concluded, despite the fact that zthere were no shock absorbers between the tires' rubber and the lab floor.

The team said the configuration of the trailer and the equipment inside it was similar in many respects to the lab described in detail by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his speech to the United Nations in February.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Posted by Joshua Tanzer | April 13, 2006