AS SAYLIYA CAMP, Qatar, 14 April 2003 — US forces have yet to find conclusive proof that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, but thousands of sites remain to be searched, the US war commander said yesterday.
“I have not found any that I have absolutely satisfied myself are...weapon of mass destruction materials,” Gen. Tommy Franks told CNN in an interview at Central Command war headquarters in Qatar.
“But you’re talking about 2,000, 3,000 perhaps, places in this country where we know we’re going to go and investigate each one of them. We may have...somewhere between five and 10 and 15 site exploitations ongoing in a 24-hour period of time.”
In some of these cases the testing may take as long as the US-led war Iraq has been going on, he said. The United States and Britain invaded Iraq on March 20, saying Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had failed to declare banned weapons.
But there has been no chemical or biological attack against invading troops, and no confirmed discovery of banned weapons has been reported.
Saddam’s top scientific adviser, Gen. Amer Hammoudi Al-Saadi, handed himself in to the new military authorities on Saturday. US intelligence officials believe he could be the key to unlocking secrets about Iraq’s weapons programs, but Saadi insisted Iraq had no banned chemical or biological arms.
Military planners say they are convinced Iraq planned to use chemical weapons against the invaders but its command and control was so overwhelmed by the speed and ferocity of the US advance toward Baghdad that the order never went out.
The Iraqi Army was based on a Soviet model in which officers wait for the orders from superiors and rarely take initiatives. Planners say this could explain why many of the bridges rigged for destruction weren’t blown up: The divisional commanders just weren’t there or weren’t contactable to give the orders. However, officials believe the Iraqis may also have balked at using chemical weapons because of severe warnings against it from a deluge of leaflets dropped from the air by US forces.
Franks said that some suspected weapons of mass destruction had turned out to be “false positives” but work was continuing on other weapons which had been discovered.
Seeking to play down the failure so far to discover any banned weapons, he said there was a need for a “clear sense of expectation” from the military campaign. “The first thing that we wanted to do was fight this war and I think we’re reasonably well satisfied with where we see that right now,” he said.
“The full exploitation of this whole issue of weapons of mass destruction is something that is going to be sequential behind the security of all these sites that we need to get into.” In an interview yesterday, US Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted the United States would find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “The combat period is over and we can now turn our attention to finding weapons of mass destruction...There’s strong evidence and no question about the fact there are weapons of mass destruction,” he told BBC television.
“We will find weapons of mass destruction.”
Meanwhile, US Marines have discovered 278 artillery shells carrying a substance that tested positive as a chemical agent, officers said yesterday. Maj. Stephen Armes, operations officer of the Marines 1st Battalion, 5th Regiment, said the shells containing suspected blister agents were found Saturday in trailers parked in a schoolyard near Baghdad.
