In the face of all the evidence, the Iraq Survey Group is still searching for WMD

The Guardian
June 4, 2004
By David Leigh and David Pallister

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 US 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; alleged rockets to fire off poison gas within 45 minutes. All these have proved non-existent.

George Tenet, director of the CIA, is the latest to take a dive into historical oblivion, announcing his resignation yesterday. His intelligence agency failed to prevent September 11; did not persuade the US 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 clear-out of failures and lies, however, there is one mysterious omission. A secretive CIA-led intelligence body set up to look for stockpiles of Saddam'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."

Tony Blair puzzled observers at his press conference last week by reviving the supposedly long-dead ghost of the ISG. He said he still believed the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction had been "accurate", and he urged the world to wait for yet another ISG report.

Claims like this seem, on the face of it, to make the phrase "in denial" barely adequate to the psychiatric depths of the occasion. Surely someone who still wants us to wait for the Iraq Survey Group's final findings must be suffering from delusions on a psychotic scale?

We shall see. Largely unnoticed, the ISG was reconstituted after 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, Duelfer awarded contracts to the US 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 US 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".

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".

Dr Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University 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."

Duelfer himself struck a bullish note to CNN last week. He denied that he was engaged in a continued wild goose chase. "A wild goose chase is when you are looking for something that may not exist," he said. "We're looking for something that does exist, and that is the truth."

But he made clear that the original hunt for apples has now covertly mutated into a quest for oranges. "You know I wasn't sent here to find weapons of mass destruction," Duelfer said. "I was sent out here to find the truth about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programmes."

The ISG certainly appears to be refocusing its efforts on the general industrial infrastructure of Iraq, rather than on getting the imprisoned scientists to lead them to apparently non-existent stockpiles.

Duelfer told US 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 Duelfer.

The military police unit at Camp Cropper was not criticised in the recent leaked US 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. Whitehall expects the ISG to publish its final report next month. If it does so, the question may at last be answered: does Mr Blair know something important that we all don't? Or has he finally flipped over the edge into a world quite disconnected from reality?

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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