A former special investigator for the Pentagon during the Iraq war said he found four sealed underground bunkers in southern Iraq that he is sure contain stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But when he asked American weapons inspectors to check out the sites, he was rebuffed…. Between March and July 2003, Mr. Gaubatz was taken by these sources to four locations – three in and around Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr, where he was shown underground concrete bunkers with the tunnels leading to them deliberately flooded. In each case, he was told the facilities contained stocks of biological and chemical weapons, along with missiles whose range exceeded that mandated under U.N. sanctions. But because the facilities were sealed off with concrete walls, in some cases up to 5 feet thick, he did not get inside. He filed reports with photographs, exact grid coordinates, and testimony from multiple sources. And then he waited for the Iraq Survey Group to come to the sites. But in all but one case, they never arrived. Mr. Gaubatz’s new disclosures shed doubt on the thoroughness of the Iraq Survey Group’s search for the weapons of mass destruction that were one of the Bush administration’s main reasons for the war. Two chief inspectors from the group, David Kay and Charles Duelfer, concluded that they could not find evidence of the promised stockpiles. Mr. Kay refused to be interviewed for this story and Mr. Duelfer did not return email. The CIA referred these questions to Mr. Duelfer…. He says the reasons he was given by the survey group were that the areas of the sites were not safe, they lacked manpower and equipment, and at the time the survey group was focusing activities in northern Iraq. “The ISG team was not organized nor outfitted for this mission in my opinion and were only concerned to look in northern Iraq. They were not even on the ground during the first few weeks of the war, and this was the most critical time to go out and exploit sites. I feel very comfortable in saying the sites were never exploited by ISG,” he said. In one instance a few inspectors did come out once to follow one lead, Mr. Gaubatz said. But they lacked the equipment and manpower to crack the bunker. “An adequate search would have required heavy equipment to uncover the concrete, and additional equipment to drain the water.”
While at this point we have no way of verifying Mr. Gaubatz’s bunker claims, we do know that ISG inspections were not extensive and were plagued by many problems. As Duelfer’s September 2004 report noted, the ISG “fully evaluated less than one quarter of one percent of the over 10,000 weapons caches throughout Iraq, and visited fewer than ten ammunition depots identified prior to OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] as suspect CW [Chemical Weapons] sites.” In addition, the ISG had inspected approximately 10 percent “or less of the total Iraqi munitions stocks” that were estimated at over 600,000 tons. Rather than visiting every site, inspectors sought out those sites “most likely associated with possible storage or deployment of chemical weapons.” In the end, the Duelfer report stated, the ISG visited only two dozen or so sites. Out of 104 ammunition storage points within the “Red Line” ringing Baghdad, the ISG used “indicators of CW-such as possible decontamination vehicles-to narrow the search to 26 sites.” The result of this search uncovered “no caches of CW munitions.” The Duelfer report concluded: “[A]lthough only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of tons of Iraqi munitions were inspected, ISG has a high confidence that there are no CW present in the Iraqi inventory.” The report also declared that the “security situation in Iraq has limited the physical verification of Iraq’s unilateral destruction claims-by excavating and counting weapon fragments, for example.” And it noted that the “the amount of inspections ISG was able to carry out was consistent with the resources available, and the safety factors involved in carrying out the inspections of munitions facilities.”
