<U.S. weapons team to leave Iraq

KEY EXCERPTS:

Frustrated task force unable to find any banned weapons

THE 75TH Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal arm of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group’s departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.

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.

"And we haven’t found it. ... Books will be written on that in the intelligence community for a long time."

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.”

Task Force 75’s experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has barely begun

In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, President Bush said, “We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.”

But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing, participants said.

But two other factors — erroneous intelligence and poor site security — dealt the severest blows to the hunt, according to leaders and team members at every level.

“We came to bear country, we came loaded for bear and we found out the bear wasn’t here,” said a Defense Intelligence Agency officer here who asked not to be identified by name.

“Is it evidence of weapons of mass destruction?” asked Deal. “No. It’s probably evidence of paranoia.”

“I don’t think we’ll find anything,” said Army Capt. Tom Baird, one of two deputy operations officers under McPhee.