Hunt for WMD Runs Out of Targets

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 W. 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 Lieutenant Colonel Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 per cent.

"We're 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 today that Baghdad had a program to make weapons of mass destruction.

"Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced that with time, we'll find out they did have a weapons program," he said.

The Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency said work would resume at a brisk pace once its 1300-person Iraq Survey Group took over.

Meanwhile, 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 and London to examine how possibly flawed intelligence might have influenced the decision for war.

David Gai, spokesman for the Iraq Survey Group, said: "The smoking guns just weren't lying out in the open.

"There's a lot more detective work that needs to be done."

Future sites in the search would be chosen from intelligence gathered in the field, and the teams would be reconfigured to include more civilian scientists and engineers, he said.

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

Led by Keith Dayton, a two-star general from Defence intelligence, the Iraq Survey Group is settling into headquarters in Qatar rather than Iraq. However, it will maintain a large presence of analysts and experts on the same palace grounds outside Baghdad where the weapons hunters are based.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday: "We've interviewed a fraction of the people who were involved [in weapons programs]. We've gone to a fraction of the sites. We've gone through a fraction of thousands and thousands and thousands of documents about this program."