New York Times,
The United States has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for weapons and military equipment, US officials said.
The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the US might have lowered its sights and no longer expects to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March.
A separate military team that specialises in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more than seven months.
But that team is “still waiting for something to dispose of”, a survey group member said.
Some US officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated.
Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days the weapons hunters still had not found weapons, but they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons surfaced in a future attack.
“We worry about what may have happened to those weapons,” said Stuart Cohen, vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
“Theories abound as to what may have happened.”
The search for Iraqi weapons remained “the primary focus” of the survey group, a Defence Department official said.
However, he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts who joined the team recently had been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search. David Kay, head of the survey group, made it known last month that he might leave his post.
The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defence Department officials said.
Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons. It was withdrawn “because its work was essentially done”, an official said. “They picked up everything that was worth picking up.”
A report due to have been released yesterday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that it was unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tonnes of chemical and biological weapons and related production facilities that US officials claimed were present “without the United States detecting some sign of this activity”.
In an interim report in October, Mr Kay acknowledged that his team had failed to find illicit weapons or active weapons programs in Iraq, but said it had discovered evidence that the ousted Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, planned to develop the weapons and might have retained the capacity to do so.
Mr Kay has not said when he intends to release his next report – that remains a subject of debate within the Bush Administration, officials said.
