Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use
By JUDITH MILLER and WILLIAM J. BROAD

American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment. 
    "Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process." 
     The Bush administration has said the two trailers, which allied forces found in Iraq in April and May, are evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding a program for biological warfare. In a white paper last week, it publicly detailed its case, even while conceding discrepancies in the evidence and a lack of hard proof. 
       Now, intelligence analysts stationed in the Middle East, as well as in the United States and Britain, are disclosing serious doubts about the administration's conclusions in what appears to be a bitter debate within the intelligence community. Skeptics said their initial judgments of a weapon application for the trailers had faltered as new evidence came to light. 
      Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, said the dissenters "are entitled to their opinion, of course, but we stand behind the assertions in the white paper." 
     In all, at least three teams of Western experts have now examined the trailers and evidence from them. While the first two groups to see the trailers were largely convinced that the vehicles were intended for the purpose of making germ agents, the third group of more senior analysts divided sharply over the function of the trailers, with several members expressing strong skepticism, some of the dissenters said. 
     In effect, early conclusions by agents on the ground that the trailers were indeed mobile units to produce germs for weapons have since been challenged. 
     "I have no great confidence that it's a fermenter," a senior analyst with long experience in unconventional arms said of a tank for multiplying seed germs into lethal swarms. The government's public report, he added, "was a rushed job and looks political." This analyst had not seen the trailers himself, but reviewed evidence from them. 
      The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons. 
      Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon. 
       Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank. 
      Senior intelligence officials in Washington rebutted the skeptics, saying, for instance, that the Iraqis might have obtained the needed steam for sterilization from a separate supply truck. 
      The skeptics noted further that the mobile plants had a means of easily extracting gas. Iraqi scientists have said the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. While the white paper dismisses that as a cover story, some analysts see the Iraqi explanation as potentially credible. 
        A senior administration official conceded that "some analysts give the hydrogen claim more credence." But he asserted that the majority still linked the Iraqi trailers to germ weapons. 
     The depth of dissent is hard to gauge. Even if it turns out to be a minority view, which seems likely, the skepticism is significant given the image of consensus that Washington has projected and the political reliance the administration has come to place on the mobile units. At the recent summit meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, President Bush cited the trailers as evidence of illegal Iraqi arms. 
      Critics seem likely to cite the internal dispute as further reason for an independent evaluation of the Iraqi trailers. Since the war's end, the White House has come under heavy political pressure because American soldiers have found no unconventional arms, a main rationale for the invasion of Iraq. 
      Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who also used Iraqi illicit weapons as a chief justification of the war, has been repeatedly attacked on this question in Parliament and outside it. 
     Experts described the debate as intense despite the American intelligence agencies' release last week of the nuanced, carefully qualified white paper concluding that the mobile units were most likely part of Iraq's biowarfare program. It was posted May 28 on the Internet at www.cia.gov.
     "We are in full agreement on it," an official said of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency at a briefing on the white paper. 
     The six-page report, "Iraqi Mobile Biological Warfare Agent Production Plants," called discovery of the trailers "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." 
      A senior administration official said the White House had not put pressure on the intelligence community in any way on the content of its white paper, or on the timing of its release. 
     In interviews, the intelligence analysts disputing its conclusions focused on the lack of steam sterilization gear for the central processing tank, which the white paper calls a fermenter for germ multiplication. 
     In theory, the dissenting analysts added, the Iraqis could have sterilized the tank with harsh chemicals rather than steam. But they said that would require a heavy wash afterward with sterile water to remove any chemical residue - a feat judged difficult for a mobile unit presumably situated somewhere in the Iraqi desert. 
    William C. Patrick III, a senior official in the germ warfare program that Washington renounced in 1969, said the lack of steam sterilization had caused him to question the germ-plant theory that he had once tentatively endorsed. "That's a huge minus," he said. "I don't see how you can clean those tanks chemically."
     Three senior intelligence officials in Washington, responding to the criticisms during a group interview on Tuesday, said the Iraqis could have used a separate mobile unit to supply steam to the trailer. Some Iraqi decontamination units, they said, have such steam generators. 
     The officials also said some types of chemical sterilization were feasible without drastic follow-up actions. 
      Finally, they proposed that the Iraqis might have engineered anthrax or other killer germs for immunity to antibiotics, and then riddled germ food in the trailers with such potent drugs. That, they said, would be a clever way to grow lethal bacteria and selectively decontaminate the equipment at the same time - though the officials conceded that they had no evidence the Iraqis had used such advanced techniques. 
      On the second issue, the officials disputed the claim that the mobile units could make only small amounts of germ-laden liquids. If the trailers brewed up germs in high concentrations, they said, every month one truck could make enough raw material to fill five R-400 bombs. These were a standard Iraqi munition for anthrax. 
       Finally, the officials countered the claim that the trailers had no easy way for technicians to drain germ concoctions from the processing tank. The fluids could go down a pipe at its bottom, they said. While the pipe is small in diameter - too small to work effectively, some analysts hold - the officials said high pressure from an air compressor on the trailer could force the tank to drain in 10 or 20 minutes. 
       A senior official said "we've considered these objections" and dismissed them as having no bearing on the overall conclusions of the white paper. He added that Iraq, which declared several classes of mobile vehicles to the United Nations, never said anything about hydrogen factories. 
      Some doubters noted that the intelligence community was still scrambling to analyze the trailers, suggesting that the white paper may have been premature. They said laboratories in the Middle East and the United States were now analyzing more than 100 samples from the trailers to verify the intelligence findings. Allied forces, they noted, have so far failed to find any of the envisioned support vehicles that the trailers would need to produce biological weapons. 
      One skeptic questioned the practicality of some of the conjectural steps the Iraqis are envisioned as having taken to adapt the trailers to the job of making deadly germs. 
     "It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," he said of the central tank. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that's true of any tin can." 

The reporting for this article was carried out by Judith Miller in Iraq and Kuwait and by William Broad in New York. Her agreement with the Pentagon, for an "embedded" assignment, allowed the military to review her copy to prevent breaches of troop protection and security. No changes were made in the review.

$26.95
336 pages
Hardcover Novel with 13 Full-Color Plates
ISBN 1-891830-44-9

Published by Top Shelf in August.
Order here.

With an introduction by Neil Gaiman, thirteen color plates by José Villarrubia, and a dust jacket design by Chip Kidd.

"Do not trust the tales, or the town, or even the man who tells the tales. Trust only the voice of the fire." -- Neil Gaiman, from the Introduction

"A burning bush of a novel full of earthy wonder and wisdom, Voice of the Fire is a head-spinning trip down time's sacred whirlpool." -- Richard Gehr, Village Voice

"Alan Moore is the best and most innovative writer in graphic novels. I have been a huge admirer for years." -- Michael Moorcock

"Alan takes genuine risks and justifies them: you feel, all the way, the rush of discovery; authorial privilege endangered by the savage voices he allows into his head." -- Iain Sinclair

"A first novel, Voice Of The Fire, slices through the history of his Northampton home, from the Stone Age up to his literal conjuring of an ending from the world around him, swallowing hallucinogens, beaming in messages from the TV -- a wild, shamanic stretching of the writers art." -- Nick Hasted, Uncut

"A daring, unsettling work of literature." -- Locus

"Remarkable, savage and, at times, unbearably beautiful…" -- Time Out

In a story full of lust, madness and ecstasy, we meet twelve distinctive characters that lived in the same region of central England in the span of six thousand years. Their narratives are woven together in patterns of recurring events, strange traditions and uncanny visions. First, a cave-boy looses his mother, falls in love and learns a deadly lesson. He is followed by an extraordinary cast of characters: a murderess who impersonates her victim, a fisherman who believes he has become a different species, a Roman emissary who realizes the bitter truth about the Empire, a crippled nun who is healed miraculously by a disturbing apparition, an old crusader whose faith is destroyed by witnessing the ultimate relic, two witches, lovers, who burn at the stake…   Each interconnected tale traces a path in a journey of discovery of the secrets of the land.
     In its last chapter, Moore himself describes the novel: “It’s about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It’s about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing-point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare gauze no thicker than a page. It’s about the powerful glossolalia of witches and their magical revision of the texts we live in. None of this is speakable.”
    In the tradition of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, Schwob’s Imaginary Lives and Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy, Moore travels through history blending truth and conjecture, in a novel that is dazzling, moving, sometimes tragic, but always mesmerizing.
    This edition presents Voice of the Fire for the first time in hardcover format, featuring an introduction by Neil Gaiman, thirteen full-color plates by José Villarrubia (Promethea & The Mirror of Love), and a dust jacket designed by Chip Kidd.
 

Historian accuses Washington of failing to face the facts

Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent
Monday June 2, 2003
The Guardian

The United States is a "danger to the world" because of its denial that it is a military and economic empire, according to Niall Ferguson, historian and new-found darling of the American right.
     Prof Ferguson is author of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, the book whose tie-in TV series controversially concentrated on the liberalising latter days of the British empire. He said that America's refusal to admit to "what it was" meant it risked never learning the lessons of British expansionism.
    "The United States is the empire that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial, and US denial of this poses a real danger to the world. An empire that doesn't recognise its own power is a dangerous one."
     Prof Ferguson passed up a dinner invitation from the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, to address the Guardian Hay Festival.
    He told his audience that, with military bases in three-quarters of the countries of the world, and 31% of all wealth, America made the British empire at its zenith in 1920, when a quarter of the globe was pink, look "like a half-baked thing".
     But he warned that America was too much of a military empire to last, too fond of short-term interventions in Haiti, Lebanon and now Iraq that lacked "sustained commitment to the dirty work of rebuilding".
      "As Iraq is showing, military commands cannot create law and order. Their job is to kill people. The British empire learned that the military must be subservient to civilian power if you are to build civil administrations."
    America's critical weakness, however, was its fatal lack of self-knowledge, he said. "When you talk to Americans about empire they say, 'but we came into existence to fight imperialism.'
    "US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously told al-Jazeera 'we don't do empire'. But how can you not be an empire and maintain 750 military bases in three-quarters of the countries on earth?" He argued that "Britain had an amazing capacity for self-criticism, even when the empire was at its height.
     "The Americans simply don't believe they are there. But since they annexed the Philippines in 1898, they have acted as an imperial power."
    Furthermore, he insisted, the people who were "now in charge of the defence department have grabbed September 11 as a chance to push through the imperial agenda". But only a few, on the neo-conservative right, were prepared to use the e-word publicly.
     Prof Ferguson, professor of economics at New York University after leaving Oxford, said he did not see the concept of empire as necessarily a bad thing. "In all kinds of ways the British empire from the 1850s onwards was an incredibly liberal one. For all the warts on its face it created a free enterprise global economy, protected women and stopped infanticide in India, and ultimately brought representative democracy. I believe a liberal empire can do good."
     The plight of most of Africa's states which were former colonies was dramatically worse than at independence. But he doubted the US could be a "better liberal empire that learns from Britain's mistakes, even though the US is vastly more prosperous and militarily strong than Britain ever was."
     He compared the "unique situation" the US felt it was in now in Iraq with a proclamation the British made on entering Baghdad in 1917: "Our armies do not come into your lands and your cities as conquerors, but as liberators..."
     Prof Ferguson said the concept of "conquest as a form of liberation, of building an empire of democracy, is not new. Britain did it too in its liberal heyday. What we are looking at is a second Anglophonic empire similar in many ways to the first, and that has to be recognised."
     Security men removed a self-styled "shamanistic poet", Niall McDevitt, from the lecture, when he accused Prof Ferguson of trying to "alleviate guilt" [about the empire], while reciting a poem in pidgin on the imperial legacy in the New Hebrides islands in the Pacific.
      "I know you are Irish," Prof Ferguson told him, "but what is your question?"

COURTESY JOHN COULTHART!

MILAN, Italy (Reuters) -- McDonald's has sued one of Italy's top food critics for raking its restaurants over the coals, but the critic says he has no intention of going back on saying its burgers taste of rubber and its fries of cardboard. 
    With the court case ongoing, McDonald's of Italy said Friday the critic's comments were "clearly defamatory and offensive to McDonald's and to the more than 600,000 Italians who each day freely choose to eat in a McDonald's restaurant." 
     Critic Edoardo Raspelli, one of the top food personalities in a country that is home to a popular "slow food" movement, said he had received hundreds of e-mails supporting him against the fast-food giant. 
      "To me this looks like the usual, very American effort to destroy criticism and destroy people," Raspelli said. "I didn't defame anybody, not even their French fries." 
     McDonald's, which has 300 restaurants in Italy, said in a statement it hoped the judge would find in its favor and "award fair damages," without specifying a figure. 
     But a spokesman for McDonald's Europe said Friday the company was hoping for a settlement out of court.