Weapons hunters watch films

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On page 2 of Sunday Times, London

"Weapons hunters watch films as trail goes cold.

by Christina Lamb, Baghdad.

"Specialist search teams in Iraq have run out of places to look for weapons
of mass destruction, say informed sources. They are reduced to revisiting
sites already checked by United Nations weapons inspectors earlier this
years and sitting  around in bombed-out palaces watching films.

A senior British official in the new Iraq administration has told Alastair
Campbell, the prime ministers's director of communications, that a
"backlash" is likely as it becomes increasingly clear that if Saddam
Hussein did have chemical or biological weapons, nobody can find them.

'The Americans don't care because (President George W) Bush knows he can
get awary with it, but it is a real problems for us,' the official said.

Bush and Tony Blair both claimed before the war that Saddam had a huge
stockpile of weapons that posed an imminent threat to the West. But the
failure to come up with new intelligence about where they are hidden has
left many of the 1,400 members of the Iraq Survey Group with little to do.

'We are mostly sitting around watching DVDs and doing laundry,' complained
a disgrunted member of one team. The air-conditioning system in the palace
complex where they are staying was destroyed by bombing and the group,
which includes intelligence agents, scientists and specialists in weapons
elimination and disablement, is sweltering in temperatures above 115F.

Intelligence officials have renamed sites searched by UN inspectors and
some members of the new American-led teams say this appears to be a bizarre
pretence that there is new information about where to look.

In some instances they arrive to find that the sites were bombed during the
war or that satellite pictures apparently indicating the presence of
chemical weapons turn out to be misleading. One suspect site contained only
butane gas for cooking; another group burst into a sealed room to find a
collection of vacuum cleaners.

Increasingly the team's only hope is that something will be discovered
through interviews with scientists. But the interrogation of two leading
scientists in US custody, British-trained Rihab Taha, known as Dr Germ, and
Huda Salih Ammash, known as Mrs Anthrax, is said to have yielded nothing.

The prime minister's official spokesman said the survy group had only just
started work. He stood by Blair's statement in the Commons this month that
weapons of mass destruction would be found.

The Pentagon said the search would be 'long-term, detailed and methodical'."



Note - this news item was identified as ominous by the foreign affairs
correspondent of the Times, reviewing the press on the Frost programme on
Sunday morning. However it has not been picked up by the other press or the
BBC, and is not promoted on the website of the Sunday Times.

It looks as if some of it is an off the record leak by the senior UK
representative in Iraq, to defuse little by little the growing problem for
the UK  (less so for the USA) if no WMD are found, and to explain the
difficulties for the poor Brits in having to work with these Americans (who
can't even fix the air-conditioning).

Chris Burford
London