--------------------
U.S. Hunt for Iraqi Banned Weapons Slows
--------------------

By DAFNA LINZER
Associated Press Writer

June 9, 2003, 3:33 PM EDT

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are
getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure
mounts on President Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found.

After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say
they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon intelligence experts
to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and
documents.

"It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," said Lt.
Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent.
"We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future."

Over the past week, his and several other teams have been taken off
assignment completely. Rather than visit suspected weapons sites, they
are brushing up on target practice and catching up on letters home.

Of the seven Site Survey Teams charged with carrying out the search,
only two have assignments for the coming week -- but not at suspected
weapons sites.

Lt. Col. Ronald Haan, who runs team 6, is using the time to run his
troops through a training exercise.

"At least it's keeping the guys busy," he said.

The slowdown comes after checks of more than 230 sites -- drawn from a
master intelligence list compiled before the war -- turned up none of
the chemical or biological weapons the Bush administration said it went
after Saddam Hussein to destroy.

Still, President Bush insisted Monday that Baghdad had a program to make
weapons of mass destruction. "Intelligence throughout the decade shows
they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced that with time,
we'll find out they did have a weapons program," he said.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said work will resume at a
brisk pace once its 1,300-person Iraq Survey Group takes over.

Ahead of the war, planners were so certain of the intelligence that the
weapons teams were designed simply to secure chemical and biological
weapons rather than investigate their whereabouts, as U.N. inspectors
had done.

But without evidence of weapons, the CIA and other intelligence agencies
have begun reviewing the accuracy of information they supplied to the
administration before the March invasion of Iraq. Government inquiries
are being set up in Washington, London and other coalition countries to
examine how possibly flawed intelligence might have influenced the
decision for war.

"The smoking guns just weren't lying out in the open," said David Gai,
spokesman for the Iraq Survey Group. "There's a lot more detective work
that needs to be done."

The group will work more along the model of U.N. weapons inspectors.

Future sites in the search will be compiled from intelligence gathered
in the field, and the teams will be reconfigured to include more
civilian scientists and engineers, Gai said.

Several former U.N. inspectors from the United States, Britain and
Australia, who know many of Iraq's top weapons experts, will also be
brought in.

Led by Keith Dayton, a two-star general from Defense intelligence, the
Iraq Survey Group is settling into headquarters in Qatar rather than
Iraq. However, it will maintain a large presence of analysts and experts
on the same palace grounds outside Baghdad where the weapons hunters are
based.

Several dozen staffers have moved to the palace and into other
buildings, now being turned into classified document centers, living
quarters and office space for the Iraq Survey Group.

With prewar intelligence exhausted and senior figures from the former
regime insisting Iraq hasn't had chemical or biological weapons in
years, Dayton's staff will be starting from scratch.

"We've interviewed a fraction of the people who were involved. We've
gone to a fraction of the sites. We've gone through a fraction of
thousands and thousands and thousands of documents about this program,"
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday.

Intelligence agents and weapons hunters have been speaking with
scientists and experts for the past month, but those interviews have not
led the teams to any illegal weapons and none of the tips provided by
Iraqis have panned out.

U.N. inspectors spent years learning the names and faces of the Iraqi
weapons programs. But in postwar Iraq, the Bush administration cut the
organization out of the hunt because of recent assessments that
conflicted with Washington's portrayal of Saddam's weapons.

Relations soured further amid reports that U.S. troops failed to secure
Iraq's largest nuclear facility from looters.

This week, a U.N. nuclear team returned to Iraq to survey the damage at
Tuwaitha -- where 2 tons of uranium had been stored for more than a
decade. They began scanning the facility and its equipment for leaking
radiation and signs of missing uranium.

One weapons team, specializing in nuclear materials, has been tasked to
accompany the U.N. experts until they leave on June 25.

Copyright (c) 2003, The Associated Press

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, visit:

        http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/aam.html

AAM Website:  http://www.danenet.wicip.org/aam
----------------------------------------------------------------------------