Hunt for Iraqi weapons slows to crawl

US military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on US President George Bush to explain why no banned arms have been found.

After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for Pentagon intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents.

“It doesn’t appear there are any more targets at this time,” said US Lt Col Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30%. “We are hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future.”

Over the past week, his and several other teams have been taken off assignment completely. Of the seven Site Survey Teams charged with carrying out the search, only two have assignments for the coming week – but not at suspected weapons sites.

The slowdown comes after checks of more than 230 sites – drawn from a master intelligence list compiled before the war – turned up none of the chemical or biological weapons the Bush administration said it went after Saddam Hussein to destroy.

Still, Bush insisted yesterday that Baghdad had a programme to make weapons of mass destruction. “Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons programme. I am absolutely convinced that with time, we will find out they did have a weapons programme,” he said.

The Pentagon’s Defence Intelligence Agency said work will resume at a brisk pace once its 1,300-person Iraq Survey Group takes over.

Without evidence of weapons, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have begun reviewing the accuracy of information they supplied to the administration before the March invasion of Iraq.

Government inquiries are being set up in Washington, London and in the capitals of other coalition countries to examine how possibly flawed intelligence might have influenced the decision for war.

“The smoking guns just were not lying out in the open,” said David Gai, a spokesman for the Iraq Survey Group. ”There is a lot more detective work that needs to be done.”

Future sites in the search will be compiled from intelligence gathered in the field, and the teams will be reconfigured to include more civilian scientists and engineers, Gai said.

Several former UN inspectors from the US, Britain and Australia, who know many of Iraq’s top weapons experts, will also be brought in.