It is indisputable that "Mobile Weapons Labs in Iraq" was a lie

[ck4829]

We need more information on this.

When did members of the Bush Administration start saying this?
When did they stop?
Who said that these labs existed?
Bush claimed that these labs were physically found, this turned out to be not true, but the media did not call him out on it, did anyone else say this (Petraeus may have, and he will be the one to give the report on Iraq's "progress" tomorrow, imagine that)?

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. The CIA had a color cartoon drawing of the "lab" on it's website

at the time. Arrows pointed out the various features & functions. I believe it was the CIA who were grasping for straws on that one, working in partnership with jr to keep the WMD scare alive while they completed the irreversible full occupation of Iraq.

[porphyrian]

2. I believe they were being ordered to provide specific information, if I remember correctly...

Wasn't Cheney standing over their shoulder, cherry picking "facts" to support selling the war and firing everyone who dared say otherwise?

[kenny blankenship]

4. Was it done in crayons?

See if it were a crayon drawing that would raise a red flag for me, 'cuz I'm the discerning skeptical type. But if it were precisely drawn in Illustrator by a draftsman, oh, I'd trust it implicitly. If you show me a crisply turned out computer graphic of something, I assent immediately, 'cuz it looks so neat it just has to be real!

It's just stunning how easily they duped millions and millions of Americans. Frigging line art drawings substituting for photographs, easily exposed forgeries purporting to show Iraq buying Niger's uranium, the British "intelligence" dossier plagiarized paragraph for paragraph from an old masters candidate's paper...

Think of how bad they could deceive the country if they ever devoted significant resources to making their hoaxes look real!

(this is one reason I doubt the MIHOP CT stuff. Look at the dismal quality of the Iraq War forgeries and lies: these people are sloppy and crude. The crazed shit CT'ers allege about 9/11 is far, far beyond the capabilities of the people who foisted the Iraq War on us.)

[The_Casual_Observer]

5. They didn't need to dupe millions of americans, just a few

gullible "reporters" with as much technical training /experience as Oprah Winfrey.

[rucky]

3. Yep. Not just a mistake, but an out-and-out LIE.

I'll try to dig up the video of Colin Powell's address to the UN Secruity Council. I saw it live on the Span, and could smell the bullshit dripping from my TV screen.

[spanone]

6. this may help

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/11/AR2006041101888.html

more:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/05/13/sprj.irq.mobile.lab/index.html

[ck4829]

7. Thanks, this does help a lot

We need to bring this issue up front and center.

[Garbo 2004]

8. "Curveball" was the major source of this BS. Those in intel at CIA & other agencies who said he was

not reliable (this was before the invasion) were ignored. Tyler Drumheller who was at CIA, for example: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/24/AR2006062401081.html

And just for another example, from article on the 2004 Senate Intel Committee report:

'The Dots Never Existed'
A damning report on Iraq intelligence failures throws the administration a Curve Ball
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek

July 19 issue - The more he read, the more uneasy he became. In early February 2003 Colin Powell was putting the finishing touches on his speech to the United Nations spelling out the case for war in Iraq. Across the Potomac River, a Pentagon intelligence analyst going over the facts in the speech was alarmed at how shaky that case was. Powell's presentation relied heavily on the claims of one especially dubious Iraqi defector, dubbed "Curve Ball" inside the intel community. A self-proclaimed chemical engineer who was the brother of a top aide to Iraqi National Congress chief Ahmad Chalabi, Curve Ball had told the German intelligence service that Iraq had a fleet of seven mobile labs used to manufacture deadly biological weapons. But nobody inside the U.S. government had ever actually spoken to the informant—except the Pentagon analyst, who concluded the man was an alcoholic and utterly useless as a source. He recalled that Curve Ball had shown up for their only meeting nursing a "terrible hangover."

After reading Powell's speech, the analyst decided he had to speak up, according to a devastating report from the Senate intelligence committee, released last week, on intelligence failures leading up to the Iraq war. He wrote an urgent e-mail to a top CIA official warning that there were even questions about whether Curve Ball "was who he said he was." Could Powell really rely on such an informant as the "backbone" for the U.S. government's claims that Iraq had a continuing biological-weapons program? The CIA official quickly responded: "Let's keep in mind the fact that this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say," he wrote. "The Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5412317/site/newsweek