- The United States Army commander in Iraq has said that
while there is documentary evidence to suggest that the country had an
active program for chemical and biological weapons, nothing has been found
to show the country's military was prepared to use them on US forces.
-
- And a senior Pentagon official, Stephen Cambone, said
on Wednesday that tests were continuing on a trailer captured from a defector
that might have been part of a mobile laboratory system.
-
- Mr Cambone, the Defence Department's undersecretary for
intelligence, said: "Technical experts have concluded that the unit
does not appear to perform any function beyond what the defector said it
was for . . . the production of biological agents."
-
- The suspected presence of weapons of mass destruction
was a prime justification by President George Bush for waging war to disarm
Saddam Hussein's regime.
-
- Lieutenant-General William Wallace, commander of the
army's 5th Corps, said US forces had uncovered "no evidence of him
trying to employ them directly against US troops".
-
- He said he could only speculate on the reasons and offered
several theories.
-
- One possibility was that in their haste to hide material
from inspectors "they were so clever in disguising that and burying
it so deep" it could not be retrieved rapidly enough. Other possibilities
were that US forces moved too fast for Iraqis to respond and that prewar
initiatives urging commanders not to use weapons of mass destruction succeeded.
-
- The suspect trailer, Mr Cambone said, was turned over
to US officials by Kurds who captured it at a checkpoint on April 19 in
northern Iraq. It had been cleaned with a "very caustic substance"
and painted "nice green military colours," he said.
-
- In a presentation to the United Nations in February,
the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said Iraq had at least seven mobile
weapons factories. He called their existence "one of the most worrisome
things that emerges from the thick intelligence file".
-
- Mr Powell told the Security Council that US officials
got the information from defectors and knew what many lab components such
as pumps, compressors and fermenters looked like and how they fitted together.
-
- Mr Cambone said there were "common elements"
in the trailer and the information Mr Powell presented. Teams have visited
about 70 of more than 600 suspected sites, and no evidence of weapons of
mass destruction had been found, Mr Cambone said. More inspection forces
were being sent to Iraq, he said. "It is a tough, laborious process."
-
- The director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, Vice-Admiral
Lowell Jacoby, who was with Mr Cambone at the briefing, said it was too
early in the process to reach any conclusions.
-
- General Wallace had said in the early days of the war
that "the enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd war-gamed
against" and remarked on overextended supply lines.
-
- The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and other top
Pentagon officials played down his comments. General Wallace said he had
no apologies for the comments he made during the war.
-
- The enemy, he said, was "much more aggressive than
what we expected him to be, or at least what I expected him to be",
while the fedayeen paramilitary were "at least fanatical, if not suicidal".
-
- US central command has announced the capture of Ghazi
Hammud al-Ubaydi, former Baath Party regional command chairman for the
Al-Kut district. He is No. 32 on the list of 55 most-wanted suspects.
- http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/08/1052280379817.html
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