White House hotly denies report on Iraq WMD

WASHINGTON, Apr 12 (Reuters) The White House today angrily denied a newspaper report that suggested President George W Bush in 2003 declared the existence of biological weapons laboratories in Iraq while knowing it was not true.

On May 29, 2003, Bush hailed the capture of two trailers in Iraq as mobile biological laboratories and declared, ''We have found the weapons of mass destruction.'' The report in The Washington Post said a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. The newspaper cited government officials and weapons experts who participated in the secret mission or had direct knowledge of it.

The Post said the group's unanimous findings had been sent to the Pentagon in a field report, two days before the president's statement.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the account ''reckless reporting'' and said Bush made his statement based on the intelligence assessment of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), an arm of the Pentagon.

Bush cited the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction as the prime justification for invading Iraq. No such weapons were found.

A U S intelligence official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, confirmed the existence of the field report cited by the Post, but said it was a preliminary finding that had to be evaluated.

''You don't change a report that has been coordinated in the (intelligence) community based on a field report,'' the official said. ''It's a preliminary report. No matter how strongly the individual may feel about the subject matter.'' McClellan said the Post story was ''nothing more than rehashing an old issue that was resolved long ago,'' pointing out that an independent commission on Iraq had already determined the intelligence on alleged Iraqi biological weapons was wrong.

'RECKLESS REPORTING' When an ABC reporter pressed McClellan on the subject at his morning briefing, McClellan upbraided the network for picking up on the report.

''This is reckless reporting and for you all to go on the air this morning and make such a charge is irresponsible, and I hope that ABC would apologize for it and make a correction on the air,'' he said.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were classified and shelved, the Post reported. It added that for nearly a year after that, the Bush administration continued to publicly assert that the trailers were biological weapons factories.

The authors of the reports -- nine U S and British civilian experts -- were sent to Baghdad by the DIA, the newspaper said.

A DIA spokesman told the paper that the team's findings were neither ignored nor suppressed, but were incorporated in the work of the Iraqi Survey Group, which led the official search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The team's work remains classified. But the newspaper said interviews revealed that the team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons.

''There was no connection to anything biological,'' one expert who studied the trailers was quoted as saying.

REUTERS SRS BST2155