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Larger team for Iraq to hunt for weapons

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

Washington MAY 31. In a bid to come to terms with an embarrassing situation, the Pentagon has announced that a larger and expanded team of inspectors is heading out to Iraq to "find'' Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

The flip side of this new investigation will also make a determination if the American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was simply wrong or wide of the mark, which will then pose additional headaches to this Republican administration.

It is being said that the new focus for the search in Iraq will be on areas where documents and interviews with Iraqi scientists and other clues suggest weapons of mass destruction could be found.

The new team will consist of some 1,400 members from the United States, Britain and Australia and will take over from a "smaller'' team of the U.S. military.

In the run-up to the war against Iraq this March, the Bush administration had identified about 900 sites where weapons of mass destruction or "evidence'' of the existence of such programmes would be found. Thus far, some 200 sites have been visited, but with little or no success.

The U.S. has said that it has found two equipment-filled trailers in northern Iraq that officials have said were mobile production facilities in the realm of biological weapons.

"Do I think we will find something? Yeah, I kind of do. This is not necessarily going to be quick and easy, but it is going to be very thorough'', the head of the new Iraq Survey Group, Major General Keith Dayton, told reporters.

The top Pentagon official in the Defence Intelligence Agency has said that the establishment of this group last month represented a "significant expansion'' in the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. This newly-constituted group includes both civilian and military experts.

The Bush administration is coming under increasing questioning on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the rationale for the U.S. and the so-called "coalition of the willing" going to war with Iraq.

The President, George W. Bush, had consistently said that Mr. Hussein did indeed have chemical and biological weapons and actively involved in a nuclear weapons programme. Many of Mr. Bush's critics have pointed out that seven weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the U.S. is yet to unearth anything on the weapons of mass destruction front; and many Democrats and anti-war activists are making the point that Mr. Bush sent troops to Iraq under false pretences.

The inability to unearth any clandestine weapons programme or weapons of mass destruction is also putting a lot of pressure on nodal intelligence agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency headed by George Tenet.

The common assessment is that Mr. Bush went to war against Iraq based on the determination of the CIA and in the conviction that these weapons could fall into the hands of terror groups like Al-Qaeda.

"Our role is to call it like we see it — to tell policy makers what we know, what we don't know, what we think and what we base it on. The integrity of our process was maintained throughout and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong'', Mr. Tenet has said in a statement.

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