Mobile weapons laboratory

Mobile weapons laboratories are bioreactors and other processing equipment to manufacture and process biological weapons that can be moved from location to location either by train or vehicle.

In the run up to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, the main rationale for the Iraq War was Hussein's Iraq failure to transparently and verifiably cease Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD - nuclear, biological and chemical weapons) programs, and to destroy all materials relating thereto, as mandated in United Nations Resolution 1441. In February 2003 the then Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a presentation before the United Nations showing a computer generated view of what the laboratories looked like. He said Iraq had as many as 18 mobile facilities for making anthrax and botulinum toxin. "They can produce enough dry, biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people." Powell based the assertion on accounts of at least four Iraqi defectors, including a chemical engineer who supervised one of the facilities and been present during production runs of a biological agent. Following the invasion of Iraq two trailers were found and initially declared as the alleged mobile labs.

In the CIA briefing days before the 2003 United Nations security council presentation Colin Powell knew that all information included in the report had to be solid. "Powell and I were both suspicious because there were no pictures of the mobile labs," Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff said. Powell demanded multiple sources and the two CIA men present George Tenet, then the CIA director and John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA deputy director claimed to have multiple eye witness accounts and supporting evidence. Wilkerson claims that the two said, "This is it, Mr. Secretary. You can't doubt this one"

The information behind the mobile vehicles had come from the multiple informants but the main and most important one was known as Curveball. Curveball was an Iraqi refugee in Germany. He claimed that after he had graduated at the top of his chemical engineering class at Baghdad University in 1994, he worked for “Dr. Germ,” the pseudonym of British-trained microbiologist Rihab Rashid Taha. He led a team that built mobile labs to create biological WMD Curveball was never actually interviewed by American intelligence and in May 2004, over a year after the invasion of Iraq, the CIA concluded formally that Curveball's information was fabricated. Furthermore, on June 26, 2006, the Washington Post reported that "the CIA acknowledged that Curveball was a con artist who drove a taxi in Iraq and spun his engineering knowledge into a fantastic but plausible tale about secret bioweapons factories on wheels."

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