AP: Iraqi Trailers Are Re-Examined

By DAFNA LINZER
Associated Press Writer

U.S. weapons hunters are re-examining the only discovery the Bush administration has cited as evidence of an illicit Iraqi weapons program - a pair of trailers the CIA said were laboratories for making biological weapons, senior military officers involved in the hunt told The Associated Press.

The two metal flatbeds stocked with cooling equipment, a water tank, an air compressor and a battered fermenter were first described by Iraqi defectors as part of a weapons program. But that assertion, challenged by some U.S. defense analysts, has become the latest prewar intelligence called into question.

In six months of searches, no biological, chemical or nuclear weapons have been found to bolster the administration's central case for going to war: to disarm Saddam Hussein of suspected weapons of mass destruction.

Although Bush administration officials continue to say publicly that the trailers were part of a biological weapons program, David Kay, the CIA representative charged with leading the weapons search in Iraq, acknowledged Thursday that those findings are "still very much being examined."

"We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile BW (biological weapons) production effort," Kay told a Congressional hearing.

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