By Mike Nartker
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — There is no evidence that Iraq possessed either WMD stockpiles or active programs to create them at the time of the U.S. invasion last year, according to a report released yesterday by chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq Charles Duelfer (see GSN, Oct. 6).
The report presents the findings to date of the Iraq Survey Group, the unit conducting the search for evidence of prewar Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts. Many of the report’s findings contradict statements made prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom by President George W. Bush and other senior administration officials regarding the alleged WMD threat posed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The Iraq Survey Group found “no evidence” that Hussein had relaunched his nuclear weapons program following the 1991 Gulf War, according the report. Instead, the unit found that Iraq’s capability to carry out a nuclear weapons program “had progressively decayed” since 1991. U.S. investigators also concluded that Iraq had destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpiles in 1991, and there are “no credible indications” that Baghdad later resumed chemical weapons production, the report says. It also says that no evidence was discovered that Iraqi military units knew of plans for the use of chemical weapons during the war. In addition, the report says that Iraq destroyed its undeclared biological weapons stockpile and probably eliminated most of its bulk biological weapons agents in the early 1990s. There is also no evidence that after the mid-1990s Iraq had either plans to conduct a new biological weapons program or biological research for military purposes, the report says. The report specifically addresses the heavily disputed issue of whether prewar Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons facilities. “In spite of exhaustive investigation, ISG found no evidence that Iraq possessed, or was developing BW agent production systems mounted on road vehicles or railway wagons,” the report says. It also says that the Iraq Survey Group determined that two trailers recovered last year that were initially suspected of being mobile biological facilities were actually intended to produce hydrogen for artillery balloons, as Iraqi officials had claimed. IntentWhile prewar Iraq did not have WMD stockpiles or programs, there is evidence that Hussein intended to resume WMD efforts once U.N. sanctions were lifted. Citing interviews with Iraqi officials, the report notes both Hussein’s concerns over the continuing threat posed by Iran, as well as the former Iraqi leader’s belief that weapons of mass destruction were instrumental in his country’s victory in its war with Iran in the 1980s and in preventing coalition forces from launching a full-scale invasion of Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. The report also lists a number of examples of efforts by Hussein to retain WMD-related knowledge and infrastructure. For example, during the 1990s Hussein’s regime transferred a number of nuclear scientists to positions at the Iraqi Military Industrial Commission, where they conducted work that helped them to maintain their nuclear weapons knowledge. The Iraq Survey Group also found that in the mid-1990s, Iraq had somewhat improved its chemical production infrastructure and had conducted a “modest amount” of dual-use research. At the time of the U.S. invasion, according to the report, Iraq could have produced sulfur mustard agent within three to six months if it had chosen to do so. Iraq also had the equipment necessary to produce nerve agent within two years, but there is no evidence that Baghdad obtained large quantities of the necessary precursor chemicals, the report says. In addition, Iraq possessed since the mid-1990s a “significant” dual-use biological capability and a cadre of biological weapons scientists, the report says. It could have resumed an “elementary” biological weapons program within a few weeks to a few months, though there are no signs Baghdad planned to do so, the report adds. The Iraq Survey Group also discovered that the Iraqi Intelligence Service had maintained a set of laboratories, undeclared to U.N. inspectors, that conducted research on chemical and biological agents, the report says. It adds, though, that such research was more likely intended for intelligence operations, such as assassination attempts, than military purposes. There is also evidence that Hussein intended to develop ballistic missiles capable of traveling beyond the U.N.-allowed range of 150 kilometers, the report says, citing as evidence the development of a larger liquid-rocket engine test stand, the construction of solid-propellant facilities and research into new types of rocket fuel. In addition, the Iraq Survey Group discovered designs for three types of ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 kilometers, as well as for a cruise missile with a range of 1,000 kilometers, the report says. U.S. Senator Carl Levin (Mich.), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, charged yesterday that Duelfer’s report contradicted the rationale for war offered by the Bush administration prior to the Iraq invasion. “The fundamental conclusion of the ISG effort means that the administration’s two major arguments for going to war against Iraq were incorrect. We did not go to war because Saddam had future intentions to obtain weapons of mass destruction. The administration told the American people that we had to attack Iraq because Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that they were allied with terrorists like al-Qaeda, to whom Iraq would like to give such weapons,” Levin said during a committee hearing on the report. Bush sought to defend the war yesterday, saying that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks had forced the United States to determine where terrorists may be able to obtain weapons of mass destruction. “One regime stood out: the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein,” Bush said during a re-election campaign stop in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.. “We knew the dictator had a history of using weapons of mass destruction, a long record of aggression and hatred for America. He was listed by Republican and Democrat administrations as a state sponsor of terrorists. There was a risk — a real risk — that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons, or materials or information to terrorist networks. In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take,” Bush added. SanctionsWhile Hussein may have hoped to resume development of weapons of mass destruction some day, such ambitions were “secondary” to obtaining an end to U.N. sanctions, the report says. “He sought to balance the need to cooperate with U.N. inspections — to gain support for lifting sanctions — with his intention to preserve Iraq’s intellectual capital for WMD with a minimum of foreign intrusiveness and loss of face. Indeed, this remained the goal to the end of the regime, as the starting of any WMD program, conspicuous or otherwise, risked undoing the progress achieved in eroding sanctions and jeopardizing a political end to the embargo and international monitoring,” the report says. According to Duelfer, though, support for international sanctions against Iraq had been gradually weakening prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. He noted the diplomatic successes Iraq had achieved among some U.N. Security Council members for easing the sanctions. “There is, in my mind, little doubt that … the constraints that the U.N. was able to put around Iraq were collapsing,” he said. Defending his decision to join the Iraq war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair noted Hussein’s efforts to violate U.N. sanctions. “Just as I have had to accept that the evidence now is there were no stockpiles of actual weapons ready to be deployed, I hope others have the honesty to accept that the report also shows that sanctions weren’t working,” Blair was quoted by CNN.com as saying. “On the contrary, Saddam Hussein was doing his best to get around those sanctions, had every intention of redeveloping these programs and weapons of mass destruction,” he said. Hussein’s desire for an end to U.N. sanctions may help explain why he failed to fully cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Duelfer. “Saddam always wanted to negotiate. If he was going to accept inspectors coming in, he wanted to get something for it. He wanted to get sanctions lifted. And he kept trying to bargain or barter, and he had not realized the nature of the ground shift in the international community,” Duelfer told the Armed Services Committee. Lingering QuestionsIn his testimony before the committee yesterday, Duelfer said there were still several remaining areas of work for the Iraq Survey Group. For example, the unit has recently received a large number of documents recovered by coalition forces that will take months to review, he said. Another unresolved issue is whether WMD-related materials were transferred out of Iraq shortly before the beginning of the war, as some have suspected. “What I can tell you that I believe we know is a lot of materials left Iraq and went to Syria. There was certainly a lot of traffic across the border points. … But whether in fact in any of these trucks there was WMD-related materials, I cannot say,” Duelfer said. Duelfer told the committee that the remaining questions could likely be answered in “the next month or two.” The Iraq Survey Group has discovered evidence that former Iraqi chemical weapons scientists may be aiding insurgents, Duelfer said. He said, though, that a number of raids conducted by coalition forces over the past few months helped to reduce such a threat. “I am convinced that we successfully contained a problem before it matured into a major threat. Nevertheless, it points to the problem that the dangerous expertise developed by the previous regime could be transferred to other hands,” Duelfer said yesterday. Noting that one of stated goals of the invasion had been to prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, Senator Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) said “a terrible irony of the effort would be if in fact that had not been occurring and did in fact occur as a result of our intervention there.”
By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has not increased funding for securing and eliminating WMD materials overseas — despite claims that it has increased nonproliferation funding — and in some cases it has sought to cut back such programs, proliferation experts said this week. During the presidential debate last week, President George W. Bush said that funding for nonproliferation programs has increased by 35 percent since he took office (see GSN, Oct. 1). The White House subsequently released a table with data supporting that assertion. The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration in June released a fact sheet stating that Energy nonproliferation spending had increased “dramatically” during the administration. The Bush administration’s claims, however, lump together money for overseas threat-reduction funding — to secure and destroy weapons of mass destruction and related materials overseas — with money to eliminate U.S. fissile materials and to research nonproliferation technologies, said Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “Basically, what they’re doing is they’re including all of the defense nuclear nonproliferation account at the Department of Energy,” said Bunn. Money requested by the administration for threat reduction, he said, has remained fairly flat compared to what President Bill Clinton sought for fiscal 2001. Funding data provided by the administration, he said, shows “that roughly three-quarters of the gross [increase] in spending during the Bush terms is for the disposition of U.S. plutonium and that the vast majority of threat-reduction programs don’t get any gross [increase] at all and some actually have small declines.” The administration, in fact, requested for fiscal 2005 a decrease in funding for the three major threat-reduction programs, at the State, Defense, and Energy departments, compared to fiscal 2004. Records show requested budgets for Energy programs decreasing from $459 million to $439 million, Defense Cooperative Threat Reduction programs down from $451 million to $409 million, and State Department efforts down from $81 million to $71 million. ChargesThe government’s budget data shows that overall nonproliferation funding has, as Bush said, increased from fiscal 2001 to fiscal 2005 by about 35 percent from $1.49 billion to $2.01 billion. An analysis of the data by Bunn and his colleagues, however, suggests that about three-quarters of the increase was for disposing of U.S. plutonium and highly enriched uranium through the Energy Department program. Disposal of U.S. weapon-grade fissile materials “is an important thing,” Bunn said, “but it’s not securing nuclear material anywhere else in the world where terrorists are likely to get at it.” “If they think reducing large stockpiles of plutonium isn’t reducing a threat, then they’re in the wrong business,” said Bryan Wilkes, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration. Wilkes said the plutonium disposition program results from an agreement with Russia that requires the elimination of 34 metric tons of each nation’s weapon-grade plutonium. Bunn noted that federal budget data shows funding for the Pentagon’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program was about the same in fiscal 2001 as in fiscal 2005, roughly $410 million. The administration tried to cut money from the program for fiscal 2002, but Congress returned the funding after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bunn said. The State Department’s overall nonproliferation budget has decreased slightly since fiscal 2001, from $261 million to $251 million this year, according to the data. For the three departments taken together, the administration’s threat-reduction budget of $1.07 billion for fiscal 2005 is about the same as Clinton’s fiscal 2001 budget of $1.09 billion, adjusted for inflation, said Bunn’s Belfer Center colleague Anthony Wier. That is “almost exactly the same as the Clinton budget request for FY 2001, made before the 9/11 attacks occurred,” he said. Progress CitedDuring the debate, challenger Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) accused Bush of reduced efforts to secure foreign nuclear materials, apparently citing statistics published by Bunn and Wier in a May report, Securing the Bomb: An Agenda For Action. “There are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today. And this president, I regret to say, has secured less nuclear material in the last two years since 9/11 than we did in the two years preceding 9/11,” he said. Kerry has said he would significantly increase threat-reduction spending if elected president. Kerry also charged that “there are some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia. At the rate that the president is currently securing that, it will take 13 years to get it,” he said. Bunn said Kerry was incorrect on that latter charge. According to an analysis in Securing the Bomb, about 22 percent of the 600 or so tons of nuclear material was comprehensively secured by the end of fiscal 2003. “The amount that’s unsecured is certainly less” than 600 tons, Bunn said. Bunn said Kerry was correct that it could take 13 years to fully secure all of that material at the current rate of progress, a conclusion that was drawn in Securing the Bomb. Kerry also was wrong, Bunn said, in saying the administration was spending hundreds off millions of dollars on a new earth-penetrating nuclear weapon capability. The administration is seeking $27.6 million for fiscal 2005 and has projected a budget of $485 million for the next five years (see GSN, March 10). Administration Cites ProgressIn June, following the release of Securing the Bomb, the Energy Department issued a fact sheet headlined, “Nonproliferation Spending and Activities Up Dramatically in this Administration,” that appeared to challenge the report’s conclusions. It said that President Bush’s most recent Energy Department budget request to Congress “sought a nonproliferation budget of $1.35 billion — a nearly 75-percent increase over the last and largest budget request of the previous administration.” “No responsibility of a president is more important than national security and no element of national security policy is more important than nuclear policy,” it said, quoting a June statement by Linton Brooks, administrator of the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration. In July, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham published a commentary in the Washington Post in which he wrote that by the end of fiscal 2004 Energy will have secured 46 percent of the 600 tons of Russian and Soviet nuclear material. It also said that more such material was secured in fiscal years 2003 and 2004 than in any previous two years, and that the administration plans to finish security upgrades of all potentially vulnerable material by the end of 2008. “With all these initiatives and other efforts across the government, President Bush is pursuing the most aggressive nonproliferation effort in history,” Abraham wrote. Changing Counting RulesBunn charged the administration is “changing the counting rules to create the impression of greater progress than has yet occurred.” Abraham was able to claim 46 percent would be secured by the end of this fiscal year, Bunn said, by including partial security upgrades in the total along with comprehensive improvements. The partial upgrades include storage sites with only the first, “rapid-upgrade” steps completed, such as “bricking over windows [and] putting detectors at the doors,” he said. Bunn said the 46 percent actually represents “very slow” progress, as Securing the Bomb found that 43 percent of both initial and comprehensive upgrades had been completed by the end of fiscal 2003. It is “a substantial scaling back from earlier plans,” Bunn said, which called for completing such upgrades on 77 percent of these materials by the end of fiscal 2004. That alleged scaling back, according to Bunn, also means “a drastic acceleration will be needed” to complete the security upgrades by the administration’s goal of the end of fiscal 2008. Wilkes said an acceleration was begun last year and the 2008 goal would be met. Bunn said Abraham also used a different counting rule to make the claim that more material would be secured in fiscal 2003 and fiscal 2004 than during any other two-year period, by referring only to materials comprehensively secured. “This statement is not correct if the same definition of `secured’ is used as in the 46-percent estimate — several previous two-year periods have been better by this definition,” he said. Bunn said, using Abraham’s definition, progress on securing the material was “modestly better” in 2003 and 2004 than a previous program for upgrades in a two-year period. He said, though, because of “poor performance” in 2002, “it remains true that less material received comprehensive upgrades” in the two years after 9/11 than during the two years prior. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Securing the Bomb: An Agenda for Action was produced with funding from the Nuclear Threat Initiative. NTI is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is produced independently by the National Journal Group.]
By Chris Schneidmiller
Global Security Newswire
ANNISTON, Ala. — Nearly 200,000 U.S. first responders have received training through the Center for Domestic Preparedness here, in programs begun in the mid-1990s but accelerated after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks (see GSN, Aug. 20). Tucked away on the site of the former Fort McClellan, the center from the outside looks like a standard government office building. The wide, white hallways of its interior would not be out of a place in a high school. That’s perhaps fitting as participants here are students, learning how to aid the victims of a potential WMD attack on the United States without becoming casualties themselves. On one morning in September, 143 first responders from around the country walked the hallways lined with pictures of emergency personnel in action and a sign indicating the present terrorist threat level. They listened to classroom lectures and practiced scenarios involving chemical, biological or radiological materials. Before they went home, many would actually come into close contact with live sarin and VX nerve agents. “I think that’s going to be pretty exciting,” said Kelvin Bolden, a security officer at Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, Miss. “Are we prepared for it? We’ll know in the morning.” A Dangerous WorldBombings at the World Trade Center in 1993 and Oklahoma City in 1995 made it clear a decade ago that terrorism would occur within the United States, while the 1995 sarin attack in the Tokyo subway showed that terrorists could obtain poisonous agents (see GSN, July 28). Retired U.S. Army Col. Walt Phillips believed nonmilitary first responders would benefit from a facility akin to the U.S. Army’s Chemical School, which teaches soldiers to overcome attacks using nuclear, radiological, chemical or biological weapons. Once Fort McClellan was ordered closed in 1995, Phillips successfully pressed for Chemical School facilities to be used to train civilians. The Center for Domestic Preparedness was established in November 1997 as an agency within the U.S. Justice Department. Its job was to “prepare relevant federal, state and local officials, including law enforcement, firefighters, emergency medical personnel, and other key agencies such as public works and emergency management agencies to prepare for and respond to chemical, biological or other terrorist acts.” A group of police officers, primarily from nearby Birmingham, attended the center’s initial course on June 1, 1998. About 2,500 first responders were trained annually for the next few years at the facility, which also offered a limited mobile training program. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax mailings that quickly followed heightened the sense that U.S. emergency personnel needed more training against terrorist incidents, particularly those involving unconventional weapons. The center quadrupled its on-site training to 10,000 each year, strengthened its mobile training program and intensified its instruction on terrorism prevention. It was transferred to the fledgling Homeland Security Department in March 2003. In fiscal 2004 the center had upwards of 550 employees, most of them government contractors, and a $55 million budget. It operates six core on-site courses and has two large trailers for mobile training visits to communities, all offered free of charge to state and local first responders. “My hope is that they’ll take away a general understanding of a WMD terrorism incident,” said CDP Director Marion Cain. “How to respond to it and [that] their equipment and the techniques they’ve learned will work, and will protect them from these terrible weapons.” Like the Real ThingDanger — in the practice sense, at least — is literally around every corner in the center’s training rooms. It’s also hidden amongst the leaves of a potted plant. Even the standard practice of entering a room could be deadly, as Henderson, Ky., search and rescue coordinator Fredrick Behnke III found out. One room offered a bounty of unpleasant surprises for teams searching the office of a fictional victim of a WMD attack. There was flammable liquid in a container above the ceiling, blood in a HAZMAT container and a suspect device underneath the desk. “We walked in, the first person flipped the light on, could have started an explosion,” Behnke said. “You learn, ‘Oh yeah, don’t do that.’” Behnke was attending the four-day WMD Technical Emergency Response Training (TERT) course, the basic program for first responders and the one with perhaps the widest range of participants. Alongside Behnke were Bolden, the Mississippi hospital guard, and Danica Rast, a public safety dispatcher from Reno, Nev. The three and their fellow trainees learned about unconventional weaponry, terrorism threats and WMD attack scene management in classrooms, then put that education to work in 20 hours of hands-on training. Participants learned to suit up in protective gear, which would be crucial later in training when they confronted live chemical agents, and to assemble a decontamination triage line for “victims” of a WMD attack. They also were taught to recognize weaponry and chemical agents. “They wanted to put on the suits, drag mannequins, pick up pieces of equipment and learn how to use it,” said Terry Quarles, acting assistant director of the Chemical, Ordnance, Biological, Radiological (COBRA) Training Facility. Beyond the nuts and bolts, the students said they learned to work together with people from different disciplines and regions, and saw how this education could apply to most any public safety position. Rast’s job as a dispatcher keeps her in her workspace at all times. However, she said now she knows that a call regarding multiple people becoming sick at one location could mean an attack using a biological or chemical weapon. She’ll know to ask callers about suspicious smells or materials in the area. Information gleaned from those questions could help prepare the emergency medical personnel and firefighters that Rast sends to the call, and keep them safe if it is an attack. “I think the more knowledge you have in anything you do is a good thing,” Rast said. Rast and her colleagues spent four days at the center. The core training programs run from two to five days and target personnel with varying areas of expertise. Trainees in the WMD Incident Command Training Course, who come in with a firm knowledge of incident commands, spend three days learning to organize the response to a WMD event. They finish training with an eight-hour exercise working on a tabletop model of a city in which 150 people have been infected with some sort of agent. Participants in the three-day WMD Hazardous Material Technician Training Course have nine rooms to hone their HAZMAT skills in a WMD incident. Much of the space is filled with smoke, as music and alarms blare, all with the purpose of offsetting the training and experience they entered the center with. In a mock mailroom that has been infected with a suspicious powder, the trainees must extricate mannequins that are “victims” of the attack. There are no survivors in a room made to look like a judge’s chambers, but the students must draw samples of a fake chemical agent for testing. “Everyone in this site is dead. I had to kill them all” so the students would not try to save the victims rather than accomplishing their assigned task, said Pat Garrett, HAZMAT assistant course manager, said of his students. The Real ThingStudents in three courses don’t go home until they’ve gotten up close and personal with sarin and VX. Or as personal as one can get while completely covered in protective gear. The COBRA facility sits at a distance from the main training building, behind two guard stations and a fence topped with barbed wire. The security keeps uninvited people out of the center, while constant computerized air monitoring and an industrial ventilation and filter system prevents any chemical agent from escaping. Participants even wear a loaned set of clothes at the facility, to ensure nothing questionable sticks to their street wear when they leave. A HAZMAT class was suiting up for their tour on a Wednesday. If the three students of the TERT course seemed a bit worried, members of this group were quietly eager. “This is going to be challenging,” said Rufus Washington, a state trooper and training coordinator for the Alabama Department of Public Safety. “It’s going to take some teamwork and some organization.” The scenario calls teams to an incident in which conventional explosives are set off in a gymnasium during a basketball game. Meanwhile, a chemical agent had been placed into the air system from a row of rooms in the basement area. Broken into three teams, the responders will have to rescue survivors of the explosion, preserve a crime scene in one room with several deceased mannequins and sample and monitor live chemical agents in another space. While other groups are shown exactly where the VX and sarin are placed, the highly trained HAZMAT personnel will have to find it on their own. In the wake of real incidents involving anthrax (see GSN, July 26) and ricin (see GSN, July 7), hands-on training of this sort could be crucial on the job, students and trainers said. “They leave here very confident that they can do this,” said Bruce Mitchell, COBRA team leader. “This is real. It’s something they need to know about.” More WorkThere are 11 million first responders and other personnel in the United States who need training in terrorism response, according to the center, meaning its work will never be finished. Not, however, for lack of trying. Roughly 60 percent of the CDP participants are certified trainers in their home jurisdictions. They go home with books, compact discs and heads full of new knowledge to pass on. Through on-site, mobile and extension programs, the center at last count had trained 199,579 responders since its inception. Meanwhile, new initiatives are being planned. The Homeland Security Office of Domestic Preparedness is developing training procedures for personnel in private industries that could be at risk for an attack, such as chemical plants. The center is also collaborating with the U.S. Agriculture Department on pilot courses training agricultural first responders to detect and manage biological attacks on U.S. crops and livestock. If the pilot courses are successful, the program could be added to the core CDP program. The center’s employees and their students can only hope all this work goes to waste. “Of course, we hope we never have to use it,” Washington said. “But if we do, the education and knowledge will be very important.”
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