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Posted: 12 May 2003, 08:03
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id ... 3&set_id=1
Washington - The team searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is ending its operation without discovering any proof that Saddam Hussein had any such weapons.
Having investigated numerous sites identified by United States intelligence as those likely to harbour stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the team has all but accepted it is unlikely to find any. As a result it is winding up its operations and a new, scaled-down unit will take over.
The leader of the US Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, Colonel Richard McPhee, said on Sunday that his team of biologists, chemists, computer experts and documents specialists had arrived in Iraq fully believing the intelligence community's warning that Saddam had given "release authority" to those in charge of a chemical arsenal.
"We didn't have all those people in protective suits for nothing," he said. "(But if they planned to use those weapons) there had to have been something to use, and we haven't found it. Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."
Saddam's alleged possession of WMD was one of the central pretexts given by Washington and London for the war against Iraq. In a February presentation to the United Nations, US Secretary of State Colin Powell identified a number of sites he said were producing WMD.
When US President George Bush made his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, he said: "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated."
Some progress has been made. It was reported on Sunday that a team of experts searching for WMD had concluded that a trailer found near the city of Mosul in northern Iraq last month is a mobile biological weapons laboratory.
The team admitted, however, that other experts disagreed with their assessment. Some officials claim that up to three such laboratories have been discovered, although no biological or chemical agents have been found at any of them.
On Sunday, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, said WMD might still be in the hands of Iraqi special units. "Were they fully deployed and could they have been brought to bear on us, or are they still perhaps out there somewhere in some sort of bunker and could have been used?" he asked. "We are trying to run that one to the ground."
But those on the ground appear more sceptical. US central command started the war with a list of 19 priority suspected weapons sites. Of those, all but two have been searched without uncovering any evidence.
Some experts believe that one of the problems has been that WMD search teams were held back from the frontlines for too long, allowing Iraqi forces to dismantle or destroy equipment. Others believe that the assessment that such weapons existed was wrong.
One Defence Intelligence Agency official said: "We came to bear country, and we came loaded for bear, and we found that the bear was not here."
The search for WMD will continue under the management of the Iraq Survey Group. The White House has claimed this is a bigger unit, but team officials admit they are scaling back their weapons-hunting staff for lack of work and instead are bolstering their numbers with people with expertise in other fields. - Independent Foreign Service
