The Pentagon claimed yesterday to have found a mobile biological weapons laboratory in Iraq, and large quantities of documents on Saddam Hussein’s development of other weapons.
Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon undersecretary for intelligence, said the trailer, captured 10 days after the end of the war, could not have been used as anything other than a bio-weapons laboratory. But he stopped short of describing it as a ”smoking gun”.
He conceded that there was no proof that it had actually been used to make biological weapons. Before its capture its surfaces had been cleaned with a ”caustic agent” such as ammonia, and it was still being tested for signs of biological agents inside.
But the large trailer, which had been inspected by American and British experts, met the description of biological weapons laboratories provided before the war by an Iraqi defector, who said he had helped to build them.
That description was part of the case against Iraq put before the UN security council in February by the secretary of state, Colin Powell.
Cambone said the trailer was captured on an Iraqi tank transporter at a Kurdish checkpoint in northern Iraq on April 19, 10 days after Baghdad fell. Inside, investigators found a fermenter used for growing bacteria and a system to prevent waste gases from the fermentation escaping, which might allow the the laboratory to be detected.
”So while some of the equipment on the trailer could have been used for purposes other than biological weapons agent production, US and UK technical experts have concluded that the unit does not appear to perform any function beyond what the defector said it was for, which was the pro duction of biological agents,” Cambone said.
If it is confirmed that the trailer was used to make prohibited weapons it will greatly help Washington and London, which justified the invasion of Iraq by arguing that that President Saddam had a weapons programmes which posed a serious threat.
Lieutenant-General William Wallace, the US army commander in Iraq, said his troops had come across ”plenty” of documentary evidence that Saddam had an active programme of weapons of mass destruction.
”It’s taking us a while … to sort through the documentary evidence,” Gen Wallace, head of the army’s Fifth Corps, said in a video link to a Pentagon press conference.
”A lot of the information that we’re getting is coming from lower-tier Iraqis who had some knowledge of the program, but not full knowledge of the program, and it’s just taking us a while to sort through all of that.”
He said that it was possible that the ousted regime had not used biological or chemical weapons because it had hidden them so well they were impossible to get to at short notice when the invasion began.
”Inspectors only left Baghdad a few days before the start of the campaign,” he said. ”Because they were so clever in disguising them and burying them so deep, they themselves had a problem getting to it.”
There have been a string of unofficial reports since the war that banned weapons had been found, all of which have proved unfounded.
This is the first claim that the Pentagon has given its official imprimatur to.
Cambone said that US forces in Iraq had investigated about 110 suspected weapons sites out of a total of more than 500, but the trailer described yesterday was their only substantial find so far.
But he pointed to the documentary evidence the US troops have unearthed and added: ”More of this is going to come to the surface as time goes by.” – Guardian Unlimited Â