The US military task force hunting for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq is to leave within a month, having found no trace of any illegal weapons, according to a report yesterday.
Troops with the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which has led the search for Saddam Hussein’s banned weapons programme over the past seven weeks, say they are increasingly frustrated with their failure to find any banned weapons, the Washington Post said.
The news came as the chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, told reporters at Camp as-Sayliyah in Qatar that banned weapons may still be in the hands of Iraqi republican guard units.
The US authorities ”are asking ourselves” whether that danger still existed, General Myers said.
”We try to interrogate [prisoners] with that in mind.”
Colonel Richard McPhee, who will conclude the 75th Task Force’s operations in June, said that intelligence reports before the war showed Saddam had given ”release authority” for chemical weapons to be used.
”There had to have been something to use — and we haven’t found it,” he said.
”Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time. My unit has not found chemical weapons. That’s a fact.”
Another, larger US force — the Iraq Survey Group — will be sent out to continue the search for weapons, but it will include fewer specialists. Coalition officials, including US President George Bush, have said recently that the work of inspecting sites had only just begun.
Of a US central command list of 19 top weapons sites, all but two have been searched already. Another 45 sites searched so far, from a list of 68 thought to contain some evidence of banned weapons, have also yielded nothing.
”We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear, and we found out the bear wasn’t here,” an officer with the US defence intelligence agency was quoted as saying. -Guardian Unlimited Â