Saturday, Jun 05, 2004
WMD delusions
By David Leigh & David Pallister
In the face of all the evidence, the Iraq Survey Group is still searching for weapons of mass destruction.
THE DUSTBIN of history is crammed full these days. Head-first into the garbage has just gone Ahmed Chalabi, would-be leader of Iraq, now accused of treachery against the United States and of peddling disinformation about non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
Into the bin with him has gone, as we all know by now, a chimerical tangle of irrelevant pipework: so-called aluminium tubes for nuclear bombs; so-called mobile laboratories for spreading germs; and alleged rockets to fire off poison gas within 45 minutes. All these have proved non-existent.
George Tenet, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, is the latest to take a dive into historical oblivion, announcing his resignation on June 3. His intelligence agency failed to prevent September 11; did not persuade the U.S. President of the truth about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction; and may yet prove to have murdered at least one Iraqi inmate at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Amid all this mass clearout of failures and lies, however, there is one mysterious omission. A secretive CIA-led intelligence body set up to look for stockpiles of Saddam Hussein's secret weapons, the Iraq Survey Group, is still going strong. This is despite the resignation of its head, David Kay, last January, who said with admirable crispness: "We were all wrong."
Largely unnoticed, the ISG was reconstituted after Mr. Kay's resignation, under a former American Unscom inspector, Charles Duelfer. In the midst of the abuse scandals surrounding the CIA's use of civilian interrogators, Mr. Duelfer awarded contracts to the U.S. division of British arms manufacturer, BAE Systems, to find a fresh team of "denial" and "deception" specialists, along with experts in nuclear, chemical, biological and missile systems.
BAE in April discreetly started advertising in the U.S. for these "top secret" jobs lasting six months. Defence experts say there is no doubt the posts were with the ISG, particularly as one of the tasks mentioned was "writing reports to Congress."
Mr. Duelfer wanted yet more documents unravelled, more "profiling" of imprisoned scientists and, in the case of war crimes analysts, help for interrogators "to assess the High-Value Detainee's cooperation."
Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University, England, specialist in WMD, thinks the attempt at commercial recruitment appears to be a novelty: "In the past, the ISG relied on personal contacts to find people either from the CIA or from former Unscom inspectors," he said. It is possible, he adds, that the ISG has found some significant new leads. "It seems they are trying to recruit senior-level people, especially in the nuclear field."
Mr. Duelfer himself struck a bullish note to CNN last week. He denied that he was engaged in a continued wild goose chase. "We're looking for something that does exist, and that is the truth," he said.
But he made clear that the original hunt for apples had now covertly mutated into a quest for oranges. "You know I wasn't sent here to find weapons of mass destruction," Mr. Duelfer said. "I was sent out here to find the truth about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programmes."
The ISG certainly appears to be refocussing its efforts on the general industrial infrastructure of Iraq, rather than on getting the imprisoned scientists to lead them to apparently non-existent stockpiles.
Mr. Duelfer told U.S. Senators earlier this year that it was proving virtually impossible to get Iraqi scientists to talk. This is despite the fact that 100 or so "High-Value Detainees" were still held at Camp Cropper at Baghdad airport. A military intelligence general, Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, shares control of the ISG with Mr. Duelfer.
The military police unit at Camp Cropper was not criticised in the recent leaked U.S. army report on prisoner abuse, but the inmates were being held, at least up to February, in harsh conditions contrary to the Geneva Convention.
They were spending nearly 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in small concrete cells without sunlight, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Despite the pressure, they have not provided a smoking gun for the politicians who took us to war. -
Copyright © 2004, The Hindu.