Politics quashed facts about Iraqi WMD

At one point, former UN arms inspector Rod Barton says, a CIA officer told him it was "politically not possible" to report that the White House claims were untrue. In the end, Barton says, he felt "complicit in deceit."

Barton, an Australian biological weapons specialist, discusses the 2004 events in "The Weapons Detective," a memoir of his years as an arms inspector, being published Monday in Australia by Black Inc. Agenda.

Much sought after for his expertise, Barton served on the UN Iraq arms inspection teams of 1991-98 and 2002-03. After the US invasion, he was an aide to chief US inspector Charles Duelfer.

The Washington Post reported last month that a US fact-finding mission confidentially advised Washington on May 27, 2003, that two truck trailers found in Iraq were not mobile units for manufacturing bioweapons, as had been suspected.

Two days later, President Bush still asserted the trailers were bioweapons labs, and other administration officials repeated that line for months afterward.

Barton's memoir says that well into 2004, pressure from Washington kept the US public uninformed about the true nature of these alleged WMD systems.

Former senior CIA officials denied such information was stifled.

The debunking of the "mobile biolabs" claim began in classified reports long before the US invasion, when German intelligence in 2001 and 2002 told US officials that the story's source, an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," was unreliable, official investigations later found. UN inspectors determined in early 2003, before the war, that parts of Curveball's story were false.