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No firm evidence banned weapons { April 7 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.canada.com/national/features/iraq/story.html?id=E9B5D086-E84A-4D6A-BD18-7D0C0A39D1F6http://www.canada.com/national/features/iraq/story.html?id=E9B5D086-E84A-4D6A-BD18-7D0C0A39D1F6
No firm evidence of banned weapons
Washington shifts attention to need to 'liberate' Iraq
Peter Goodspeed
National Post
Monday, April 07, 2003
KUWAIT CITY - Where are the secret caches of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that Saddam Hussein is supposed to have hidden in Iraq?
Eighteen days after the start of a war that hinged on U.S. assertions that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction posed a grave and imminent danger to world peace, there is no indication U.S. or British troops have discovered a single depot or production facility for unconventional weapons.
So far, coalition troops invading Iraq have found only indirect evidence that such weapons exist.
British soldiers have uncovered training equipment for chemical warfare near the southern city of Basra, including protective suits, gas masks and nerve gas antidotes. U.S. special forces rushed to a suspected weapons site near the town of Mudaysis in western Iraq discovered another chemical warfare training centre that contained a tiny brown-tinted bottle marked "Tabun," a deadly nerve agent first developed in the Second World War.
Little else in the line of weapons of mass destruction has been uncovered so far, and administration officials in Washington have shifted their attention to playing up the need to "liberate" the Iraqi people from a repulsive dictatorship, while playing down any urgent need to search for weapons of mass destruction.
As guns blaze all across Iraq and U.S. and British troops lay claim to large swaths of the country, no one has yet come forward with a "smoking gun" to support the original justification for the war.
Failure to find banned weapons could prove to be more than a political or diplomatic embarrassment. It could destroy the credibility of U.S. and British foreign policy for decades, since the threat posed by Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was persistently presented as the chief political, legal and diplomatic justification for the war.
Right now, U.S. officials say it is too early to suggest they won't find what they are looking for. They say their main focus is on winning the war and the search for banned weapons will come later.
"We believe that this regime does possess weapons of mass destruction," Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks, chief U.S. Army spokesman at Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, told reporters at a news conference on Friday.
"We remain convinced of that. We know that some of those may have been pulled into the Baghdad area, either delivery systems or potentially storage systems.
"But let's remember that this regime has been involved in a campaign of denial and deception for decades and has been very effective at it," he added.
"So we don't expect that we're just going to walk up on any weapons of mass destruction."
"We'll have to do things that give us control of areas that let us then do deliberate work," he said. "Our first efforts are to destroy the regime and cause its removal. Secondary efforts will be related to weapons of mass destruction."
While U.S. war planners started the war in Iraq with a list of 1,000 suspected weapons sites, special investigations units composed of U.S. military and CIA personnel have so far investigated only about a dozen possible hiding places.
U.S. officials say most of the suspect sites still lie in or near Baghdad, in areas where the U.S. military is still waging war.
In the meantime, a special "Intelligence Exploitation Unit," composed of U.S. troops, CIA specialists and private contractors hired by the U.S. government is sweeping through areas seized by advancing forces looking for clues to hidden weapons caches.
Armed with portable laboratory equipment that allows them to conduct an almost instant analysis of suspected substances, they scour the sites for evidence of chemical or biological weapons and examine documents, computers, maps and other data taken from suspected sites.
U.S. officials are also anxiously interrogating prisoners of war, including high-ranking officers who may be able to provide them with additional evidence of secret Iraqi hiding places.
Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, said over the weekend he thought it more likely U.S. and British troops will discover evidence of banned Iraqi weapons than his own inspection teams, because Iraqi scientists may be more willing to talk about their work once Saddam's regime is overthrown.
"If there is anything left, it will be easier to find it when the land has been freed," Mr. Blix said.
Iraq has repeatedly claimed it destroyed all its weapons of mass destruction after the 1991 Gulf War.
Now Iraqi officials are suggesting any weapons U.S. or British troops find in the country are likely to have been planted there by coalition forces in an effort to implicate Iraq and justify the war.
"Let me say one more time, that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction," Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan told reporters in Baghdad last week.
The longer it takes U.S. and British forces to find evidence of Iraq's possession of banned materials the more likely it may be that nations already hostile to the U.S.-led war will believe Mr. Ramadan's claim.
So far, there have been unconfirmed reports that U.S. Marines detected concentrations of cyanide and mustard gas in the Euphrates River when they tested the water to see if it was drinkable. Soldiers of the U.S. Third Infantry Division also uncovered thousands of boxes of a mysterious white powder and supplies of a nerve agent antidote at a huge industrial site about 27 kilometres south of Baghdad on Friday.
The powder was later found to be an explosive material and the industrial site has been identified as the Latifiya Explosives and Ammunition Plant at Al Qaa Qaa, a huge complex of more than 1,100 buildings UN inspectors had visited almost two dozen times previously.
While the Qaa Qaa site is devoted to conventional military explosives and missile fuels, UN inspectors still regarded it with suspicion. In 1995, Iraqi scientists acknowledged the complex had been involved in Iraqi attempts to develop an "implosion package" for detonating a nuclear weapon.
The chemical-warfare training centre which contained the bottle labelled "Tabun" is still being investigated.
But U.S. officials, citing the very small quantity of suspected nerve agent involved, say they believe the bottle was only a sample used for training purposes.
Several other discoveries by U.S. and British troops are just as ambiguous. U.S. Marines in Nasiriya seized more than 3,000 chemical warfare protective suits at an Iraqi hospital along with a quantity of nerve gas antidote, but it is unclear whether the material dated back to the Iran-Iraq war, which ran from 1980 to 1988, when both countries used chemical weapons.
The same sort of inconclusive evidence surrounds the British discovery of gas masks, protective clothing and nerve gas antidotes at a suspected chemical warfare training centre near Basra in southern Iraq.
And the fog of war still surrounds previous U.S. claims that Republican Guard units near Baghdad were armed with biological weapons.
"We know -- we know -- from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was dispersing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq," Colin Powell, the U.S. Secretary of State, told the UN Security Council in February.
Those units have since been overrun by U.S. troops. Intense searches of suspected weapons sites by U.S. special forces in western Iraq have failed to find any such rockets or warheads.
pgoodspeed@nationalpost.com
© Copyright 2003 National Post
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