Dog Bites Man: Another Dishonest WaPo Story

Washington Post writer Joby Warrick has managed to get a thinly disguised attack piece printed as news by WaPo editors. Nothing new there, but usually the MSM makes a better effort at disguising the bias of their newsditorials:

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

These are the lead paragraphs. It's not until paragraph twelve that Warrick reveals the truth:

Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington, the analysts said. "It was hotly debated, and there were experts making arguments on both sides," said one former senior official who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

In other words, two out of three teams believed that the trailers were mobile bioweapons labs.

If I were the cynical sort, I'd say that the Washington Post was trying to get back into the good graces of the radical Left, who went ballistic after this editorial of April 9, which defended President Bush's release of information from the National Intelligence Estimate.

Other cynics: Captain's Quarters and The Confederate Yankee.