IRAQ ARMS-​​HUNTERS YANKED

“The Bush admin­is­tra­tion has qui­etly with­drawn from Iraq a 400-​​member mil­i­tary team whose job was to scour the coun­try for mil­i­tary equip­ment,” the New York Times reports.

The step was described by some mil­i­tary offi­cials as a sign that the admin­is­tra­tion might have low­ered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons that the White House cited as a prin­ci­pal rea­son for going to war last March.
A sep­a­rate mil­i­tary team that spe­cial­izes in dis­pos­ing of chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been search­ing Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars. But that team is “still wait­ing for some­thing to dis­pose of,” said a sur­vey group mem­ber.
Some of the gov­ern­ment 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.

January 8th, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.