Les Jones

Middle East > Prospect: Two Out of Three Teams Said Trailers Were for WMDs

The other day the Washington Post story quoted a supposedly unequivocal report from one team. Now the Spectator says that two of the three inspection teams thought the trailers were mobile WMD labs, and the third team was in fact split, as the NY Times reported in 2003.

Curiously, on June 7, 2003, the New York Times had already described three teams looking over the trailers in Iraq. Two of the teams were in agreement that the trailers were WMD labs, but the third, more senior team was not at all "unequivocal," but "divided sharply over the functions of the trailers." Given that the dissenting experts with "direct access to the evidence" whom the Times quotes were both British and American experts, and the Post also describes the secret team as being made up of "nine civilian U.S. and British experts," the Post's scoop on the "secret" third team is looking less, well, scoopy, and more like a rehash of information mostly in the public domain for nearly three years. (See also George Gooding at Seixon.com, who got the scoop on the Post's non-scoop.)

Press fight!