Former UN inspectors join US arms search in Iraq

11.45am

WASHINGTON - The team assembled by the Pentagon to reinvigorate the hunt for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction includes dozens of former UN arms inspectors and a big intelligence component, US officials said on Monday.

The Iraq Survey Group will take charge as early as this Saturday of the search for Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and evidence of a nuclear arms development programme.

It will replace the US military's 75th Exploitation Task Force, which has failed to find any banned weapons and officials said it would take a more investigative approach.

President George W Bush cited Iraq's alleged stockpiles of such weapons as justification for toppling President Saddam Hussein. The failure to find weapons has prompted critics to suggest Bush exaggerated intelligence reports about them.

While the United States opposes a UN role in the hunt, up to 50 former UN weapons inspectors who worked in the effort in Iraq over the past 12 years have been recruited to join the Iraq Survey Group, said a defence official.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not identify the inspectors, but called them "individuals who have unique expertise that we certainly could use."

Terence Taylor, who served as a chief UN arms inspector in Iraq from 1993-97 and helped uncover Iraq's biological weapons programme in 1995, said it was "hugely important" that the Iraq Survey Group include "a large number of people with all the historical experience with previous inspections."

Taylor said military personnel with limited knowledge of Iraqi weapons programmes would be at a disadvantage in questioning, for example, Rihab Taha, the microbiologist dubbed "Dr Germ" who spearheaded Iraq's biological arms development.

"She will find it more of a challenge to speak to people with a deep knowledge" of the Iraqi programmes, Taylor added. She and other figures associated with banned weapons programmes were taken into custody by the US military after the war.

Officials said the Iraq Survey Group had a staff of about 1,400, mostly Americans but with some British and Australians, adding that a Briton may be named as its No 2 official.

It is headed by Army Major General Keith Dayton, director of operations for the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency. It will include more intelligence experts than the military force now hunting the weapons.

Top officials have rejected suggestions that the Bush administration slanted intelligence about Iraqi arms programmes to bolster the case for war. At the White House on Monday, Bush said he was "absolutely convinced with time we'll find out they did have a weapons program" but did not predict the discovery of any actual weapons.

Dayton was in Qatar, where an intelligence-analysis centre will be located, on Monday and earlier visited Baghdad, where his group will be headquartered, the defence official said.

The official called the 75th Exploitation Task Force "a combat support organisation" that relied heavily on a fixed list of suspected weapons sites.

"We haven't found the large caches of weapons which we had hoped to be able to do," the official said. "Given that, now the analytical side really needs to get involved. Think of it has a criminal investigation," the official added.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq