The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.

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Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews.

Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found themselves lacking vital tools. They consistently found targets identified by Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now to \"check the blocks\" on a prewar list.

U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top \"non-WMD sites,\" without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success.

Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has barely begun.

In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, President Bush said, \"We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.\" Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that U.S. forces had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the \"integrated master site list\" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before the war.

But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing, participants said.

But senior officials, including President Bush (news - web sites), now say that though they are confident prewar intelligence estimates will be proven correct, the weapons have been destroyed, moved to another country or are so well concealed by members of Saddam's regime that it will take much longer to find them than originally expected. Feith called the U.S. weapons hunt ''a huge undertaking. . . . We are in the early stages of this effort. We have found evidence of WMD programs, but we have a long way to go before we can gain a complete understanding of them.''


Tests continue on two trailers that U.S. officials suspect were being used as mobile weapons labs by the Iraqi regime. Feith and Schwartz said no conclusions have been reached about the trailers.


In his appearance before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) said Iraq had as many as 18 of the labs, any one of which could produce enough biological weapons in a month to kill ''thousands upon thousands.''

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was justified in part because Saddam Hussein retained scientists capable of building nuclear weapons, Washington's top arms control official said Thursday.

In an interview with The Associated Press, John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, said that whether Saddam's regime actually possessed weapons of mass destruction \"isn't really the issue.\"

London: After failing to get any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the US and Britain have decided to delay indefinitely the publication of a full report on the controversial issue, media reported today.
Efforts by the Iraq Survey Group, an Anglo-American team of 1,400 scientists, military and intelligence experts, to scour Iraq for the past four months to uncover evidence of chemical or biological weapons have so far ended in failure, The Sunday Times claimed in its report.

fantomas:
To go back to a very basic question: where are all those weapons of mass destruction?

What Bush did was right. HOw long can we keep monitoring a country. Sadamm was a threat to the peacce of the world. He wouldn't let inspectors in for 12 years, we did the right thing. Times have changed my friend...it's better to take action instead of waiting for after the fact to happen. Your one of these people who are the first to denounce a war but the first to take action after someone comes into this country and kills another 3,000 people.

PAdallascowboy:
What Bush did was right. HOw long can we keep monitoring a country. Sadamm was a threat to the peacce of the world. He wouldn't let inspectors in for 12 years, we did the right thing. Times have changed my friend...it's better to take action instead of waiting for after the fact to happen. Your one of these people who are the first to denounce a war but the first to take action after someone comes into this country and kills another 3,000 people.