WASHINGTON, April 12 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush proclaimed on May 29, 2003, that two small trailers captured in Iraq had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories," at a time that American intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

    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 a secret Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission to Iraq --not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons, and the mission's leaders transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement, the newspaper reported.

    The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved, and for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories, according to Post report.

    The authors of the reports -- nine U.S. and British civilian experts -- were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers, and the contents of the final report, "Final Technical Engineering Exploitation Report on Iraqi Suspected Biological Weapons-Associated Trailers," remain classified, the Post reported.

    But interviews revealed that the technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons, the newspaper reported.

    The story of the technical team and its reports added a new dimension to the debate over the U.S. government's handling of intelligence related to the Iraq's alleged weapons programs.

    The trailers -- along with aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq for what was claimed to be a nuclear weapons program -- were primary pieces of evidence offered by the Bush administration before the war to support its contention that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction.

    Intelligence officials and the White House have repeatedly denied allegations that intelligence was hyped or manipulated in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but officials familiar with the technical team's reports were questioning anew whether intelligence agencies played down or dismissed postwar evidence that contradicted the administration's public views about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the Post report said. Enditem