Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq
Task Force Unable To Find Any Weapons
Looks to be a very important article. Whether wmds are ever found in Iraq or not, this one says far too few troops were devoted to the search and thus raises the question as to whether the Bush administration took its own line about wmds seriously.
There are several quotes in here which are interesting.
1. Here's the initial frame and the results:
Leaders of Task Force 75's diverse staff -- biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops -- arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 -- hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.
Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.
2. Army Col. Robert Smith, who leads the site assessment teams from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said task force leaders no longer "think we're going to find chemical rounds sitting next to a gun." He added, "That's what we came here for, but we're past that."
3. Interviews and documents describing the transition from Task Force 75 to the new group show that site survey teams, the advance scouts of the arms search, will reduce from six to two their complement of experts in missile technology and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. A little-known nuclear special operations group from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, called the Direct Support Team, has already sent home a third of its original complement, and plans to cut the remaining team by half.
"We thought we would be much more gainfully employed, or intensively employed, than we were," said Navy Cmdr. David Beckett, who directs special nuclear programs for the team.
4. Team members explain their disappointing results, in part, as a consequence of a slow advance. Cautious ground commanders sometimes held weapons hunters away from the front, they said, and the task force had no helicopters of its own.
"My personal feeling is we waited too long and stayed too far back," said Christopher Kowal, an expert in computer forensics who worked for Mobile Exploitation Team Charlie until last week. |
