Global Policy Forum

By Jim Mannion

US intelligence still looking for first proof of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, acknowledges no traces found yet. US intelligence acknowledged Wednesday finding no traces of biological warfare agents in specially equipped trailers seized in Iraq amid growing questions about the intelligence that supported the US case for war against Iraq. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accentuated doubts Tuesday in saying that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction may have been destroyed before the war.

The United States claimed that Iraq had a secret chemical and biological weapons program and US commanders firmly expected their forces would face such weapons on the battlefield. But none have ever been found in Iraq. US claims that Saddam Hussein's regime secretly developed chemical and biological weapons was the prime US rationale for invading Iraq on March 20. Baghdad insisted it had destroyed all its banned weapons. Asked why the weapons were not used, Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York the Iraqis may have been caught off guard by the speed of the US assault.

"It is also possible that they decided they would destroy them, prior to a conflict. I don't know the answer," he said. British Prime Minister Tony Blair insisted Tuesday that he was certain that biological and chemical weapons would still be found. "I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction," he said on his way to a visit to Kuwait and Iraq. US forces have seized two specially equipped tractor trailers that US intelligence concluded "probably are designed to produce BW (biological warfare) agents in a unconcentrated liquid slurry."

The Central Intelligence Agency report said the trailers, and a mobile laboratory truck seized in late April near Baghdad, are "the strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program." Nevertheless, intelligence analysts who briefed reporters acknowledged they had no concrete evidence the trailers were used to make biological agents or what kind of agent they were designed to make. Their main reason for concluding the biological warfare role was the striking similarity to trailers described before the war by an Iraqi chemical engineer who managed one of the BW plants, they said. "We don't have the type of physical, concrete evidence - a bucket of botulinum for example - but we do have a number of sources who have reported consistently with what this source described," said a senior CIA analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Samples taken from one of the trailers were "negative for five standard BW agents, including Bacillus anthracis, and for growth media for those agents," the CIA report said. "We suspect that the Iraqis thoroughly decontaminated the vehicle to remove evidence of BW agent production," the report said. "Despite the lack of confirmatory samples, we nevertheless are confident that this trailer is a mobile BW production plant because of the source's description, equipment, and design," it said.

The report said production of biological agents was the "only consistent, logical purpose" of the trailers' equipment and design. However, the CIA analyst said there was no evidence that the trailer had been used before. The presence of two chemicals - urea and sodium azide - in a fermenter in the trailer had only confused the investigation, he said. "The high ph within the fermenter suggests perhaps it was decontaminated, perhaps that the Iraqis just threw things in there at the last minute. We just don't know," he said.

Senior Iraqi officials at the Al Kindi Research, Texting, Development and Engineering facility in Mosul, where the second trailer was found, claimed the trailers were used to chemically produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons, the report said. "The plant's design possibly could be used to produce hydrogen using a chemical reaction, but it would be inefficient," the report said after noting that hydrogen production was a "plausible cover story." According to the report, a source told US intelligence in 2002 that Iraq manufactured mobile systems to produce single cell proteins - such as petroleum-based animal feeds - on trailers and railcars but admitted they could be used for BW agent production.

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