[A-List] Iraq: the missing WMDs

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Washington Post / Hunt for Hussein's arsenal draws blank / Barton Gellman
in Baghdad

Hunt for Hussein's arsenal draws blank

Task force winds down as highly equipped WMD teams report back empty-handed

Barton Gellman  in Baghdad

The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that
President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according
to participants.The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally
known, has been described from the start as the principal arm of the U.S.
plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure,
expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared
objective of the war.

Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff - biologists, chemists, arms treaty
enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special
forces troops - arrived with high hopes of early success. They expected to
find what Secretary of State Colin Powell described at the U.N. Security
Council on February 5 - hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents,
missiles and rockets to fire them, and evidence of a program to build a
nuclear bomb. Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task
force members said in interviews.

Army Col. Richard McPhee, who will close down the force next month, said he
took seriously intelligence warnings on the eve of war that Hussein had
given "release authority" to subordinates in command of chemical weapons.
"We didn't have all these people in [protective] suits" for nothing, he
said. But if Iraq thought of using such 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."

Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the Defense
Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think we're
going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added, "That's what
we came here for, but we're past that."

Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found
themselves missing vital tools. They consistently found targets iden tified
in Washington to be in a different location, looted and burned, or both.
Leaders and members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior
officers guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the
motions now to "check the blocks" on a prewar list.

U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only
two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD sites,"
without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to
offer clues. Of those , the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without
success.

Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks
in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has
barely begun. In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln
on May 1, President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical
and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be
investigated." Stephen Cambone, undersec retary of defense for intelligence,
told reporters at the Pentagon last week that U.S. forces had surveyed only
70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the "integrated master
site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before the war.
But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number
of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing,
participants said. "Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief
Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha,
said in disgust at last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey
results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."

Survey teams have combed laboratories and munitions plants, bunkers and
distilleries, bakeries and vaccine factories, file cabinets and holes in the
ground where tipsters advised them to dig. Most of the assignments came with
classified "target folders" describing U.S. intelligence leads. Others,
known as the "ad hocs," came to the task force's attention by way of  human
sources on the ground. The hunt will continue under a new Iraq Survey Group,
which the Bush administration has said is a larger team. But the organizers
are reducing their weapons staffs for lack of work.

A little-known nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat
Reduction Agency, called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a
third of its original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by
half.
State-of-the-art biological and chemical labs came equipped with enough
supplies to run thousands of tests using DNA fingerprinting and mass
spectrometry. They have been called upon no more than a few dozen times,
none with a confirmed hit. The labs' director said some of his scientists
were also flying home.

Even the sharpest skeptics do not rule out that the hunt may eventually find
evidence of banned weapons. Meanwhile a Defense Intelligence Agency officer
said: "We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the
bear wasn't here."

The Guardian Weekly 20-3-0515, page 28