Editorial: A war on weather balloons?

Thursday, April 13, 2006 | 7:14 a.m.

A story published Wednesday in The Washington Post revealed more information about the "mobile biological laboratories" that the Bush administration used to justify its invasion of Iraq and to vindicate its decision to go to war for months afterward.

Much of the story was being widely reported as early as June 2003, that the alleged trailer-mounted laboratories were not weapons of mass destruction at all, but rather equipment used to fill artillery balloons with hydrogen. Such balloons gather weather information that conventional artillery units need for calculating the trajectory of their rounds.

Before the war, the Bush administration relied on information from an Iraqi defector, a chemical engineer whose code name was "Curveball." It was this now-discredited source who told American intelligence officials that these trailers were laboratories for manufacturing and disseminating biological weapons.

The Bush administration used this information in its preinvasion case before the United Nations. After the invasion, which began March 20, 2003, U.S. forces captured two trailers. What has not been known until the Post story is that the Pentagon sponsored a secret fact-finding mission to examine the trailers.

The nine-member team of experts, the Post reported, sent its unanimous finding - a field report stating that the trailers were not biological weapons - to Washington on May 27, 2003. Two days later, however, Bush declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." His administration continued in that vein until the Iraq Survey Group concluded definitively in September 2004 that Iraq had no such weapons.

The White House claims Bush was the victim of bad information from the CIA and denies that the president was aware of the field report. In our view, though, this latest article is all the more reason for a congressional investigation into what Bush knew, and when he knew it, before and after the war began.