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Former Pentagon Investigator Says Possible WMD Bunkers in Iraq Never Checked After Invasion
U.S. weapons inspectors failed to check several sealed underground bunkers in postwar southern Iraq that might have contained weapons of mass destruction, a former Pentagon special investigator said in a New York Sun report today (see GSN, Feb. 7). David Gaubatz, then with the U.S. Air Force Special Investigations Office, was assigned beginning in March 2003 to seek intelligence on unconventional weapons and to pass the information on to weapons inspectors. Gaubatz from March to July 2003 visited three sites in and around the city of Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr. In each case he was shown underground concrete bunkers in which entrance tunnels had been deliberately flooded. Sources told him the facilities contained biological and chemical weapons, and missiles whose ranges exceeded U.N. limits, according to the Sun. Gaubatz filed reports with the group of U.S. weapons inspectors that would develop into the Iraq Survey Group. He said the inspectors conducted a cursory follow-up on only one of those leads. “I have no doubts the sites were never exploited by ISG. We agents begged and begged for weeks and months to get ISG to respond to the sites with the proper equipment,” Gaubatz told the Sun. He later wrote to more senior military intelligence officials but said the sites have yet to be fully evaluated. Inspectors told him that they lacked the necessary personnel and equipment to search the bunkers and that they were focusing their efforts on northern Iraq at the time. “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,” he told the Sun. Some inspectors did make a brief trip to one of the sites, Gaubatz said, though without the equipment to open the bunker. “An adequate search would have required heavy equipment to uncover the concrete, and additional equipment to drain the water,” he said. Gaubatz said his superiors believed his sources to be “highly credible.” “The sources were deemed highly credible due to access and knowledge of the sites. Many of these sources … put their lives on the line to assist in identifying WMD. The sources would continuously ask us when the inspectors were going to come to the sites with heavy equipment to uncover the WMD,” he said. Gaubatz told the Sun that all the sites had similarities. “Everything was buried and underwater. They would drain canals and parts of the rivers. They would build tunnels underneath and they would let the water come back in,” he said. He said the tunnels in all four bunkers were wide enough for tractors and that homes near the sites were equipped with gas masks and other protective clothing (Eli Lake, New York Sun, Feb. 8).
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