WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said Wednesday it may have recovered an Iraqi
mobile biological weapons lab, the first such announcement since the
start of the war to disarm the government of President Saddam Hussein.
Murad Sezer / AP
An
Iraqi man checks his watch Wednesday on board a train at Baghdad
Central Station as he waits to leave for the southern city of Basra.
The passenger train departed for the first time since the start of
the war.
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American forces in Iraq are doing tests on a trailer that matches the
description of such laboratories, given by various sources including a
defector who says he helped operate one, Defense Department officials
said.
"On the smoking gun, I don't know," Undersecretary of Defense for
Intelligence Stephen Cambone said when asked whether this was a
breakthrough in the coalition search for weapons of mass destruction.
Cambone also announced that some 2,100 people will be sent to Iraq to
augment the weapons hunt as well as the search for information on
government leaders, terrorists, war crimes, atrocities and Iraqi
prisoners of war. The effort will be headed by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of
the Defense Intelligence Agency, Cambone said.
He said initial tests have been done on a trailer truck taken into
custody April 19 at a Kurdish checkpoint in northern Iraq. It is painted
in a military color scheme, was found on a transporter normally used for
tanks and — as an Iraqi defector has described Iraq's mobile labs —
contains a fermenter and a system to capture exhaust gases, he said.
"While some of the equipment on the trailer could have been used for
purposes other than biological weapons agent production, U.S. and U.K.
technical experts have concluded that the unit does not appear to
perform any function beyond what the defector said it was for, which is
the production of biological agents," Cambone said.
Cambone said that what the U.S. military has in its possession is the
kind of mobile laboratory that Secretary of State Colin Powell described
in a speech to the U.N. Security Council early this year in an
unsuccessful attempt to get U.N. approval for the war.
"They have not found another plausible use for it," Cambone said of the
trailer.
Cambone said part of the trailer was washed with a caustic material and
it likely will have to be dismantled before testing can be done on
hard-to-reach surfaces.
The Bush administration alleged that Iraq had chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons programs and said the main reason for the war was to
destroy them. Despite weeks of searches of suspected sites, nothing
conclusive has been reported found so far.
And although Pentagon officials suggested before the war that some Iraqi
units were armed with chemical weapons, none were found when those units
were overrun.
If proven to be a biological weapons lab, the trailer would be the first
discovered in the military campaign started March 20. On several
occasions, troops have found substances they said tested initially
positive as nerve agents or other chemical weapons materials, only to
learn from more sophisticated testing that they were crop pesticides or
explosives.
A defense official said before Cambone's press conference that he and
others "feel good" about the prospect that this time they have found
evidence of an unconventional weapons program.
Earlier Wednesday, Lt. Gen. William Wallace said that American forces
have collected "plenty of documentary evidence" suggesting that Saddam
had an active program for weapons of mass destruction.
"We've collected evidence, much of it documentary," Wallace, commander
of the Army's V Corps, said from Baghdad in a videoconference with
Pentagon reporters.
"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," he told Pentagon reporters in a videoconference from the
Iraqi capital. "And it's just taking us a while to sort through all of
that."
He did not elaborate.
Cambone said a search team of 600 in Iraq will be expanded later this
month with the dispatch of what he called the Iraq Survey Group to
oversee the hunt for weapons and other things the administration is
looking for in Iraq.
The group headed by DIA's two-star general Dayton includes 1,300 experts
and 800 support workers who will look for and analyze information on
people from the regime, weapons and terrorist ties in Iraq. It also will
gather information on Iraq's old intelligence services and those accused
of war crimes and atrocities committed by a regime that used executions
and torture to control the population.
"This is piecing together a major jigsaw puzzle, and we are only just
beginning ... to work the puzzle," Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, Director of
the Defense Intelligence Agency, said at the press conference with
Cambone.
AP-WS-05-07-03 1637EDT
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