While the headline of the lead story that McClellan harshly condemned
certainly did the administration no favors, the story
itself, as
noted,
was neither reckless nor irresponsible, but was also not necessarily of huge
consequence. Back in May of 2003, what appeared at first to be "mobile
biological weapons labs," turned out to be unsuitable for that purpose.
Perhaps ignoring conflicting information faxed in from a team of field
experts in Iraq a few days earier, in late May of 2003 the DIA and the
CIA issues reports concluding that the two trailers were bio weapons labs,
prompting the President to exclaim, on May 29, 2003, "We have found the
weaspons of mass destruction." The main problem, as the article also points
out, is that this refrain was repeated throughout the year, and was not
officially corrected by the intelligence community until the final report of
the
Iraqi Survy Group that came out over a year later. Given what
seemed to be the exaggerated selection of guestimated intelligence
information as "fact," by the administration prior to the war, the Post
article, again, with respect to the assertion of the trailers as bio weapons
labs, implicitly asked why.