The Hindu : U.S. forces stumble upon weapons of mass destruction?

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 09, 2003

International

International

U.S. forces stumble upon weapons of mass destruction?

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON APRIL 8. The Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has refused to get into the specifics of reports that the United States forces in central Iraq have into weapons and chemicals that could be called to be in the realm of mass destruction. Mr. Rumsfeld was asked to comment on a report coming out of the 101st Airborne Division that investigations of the 14 barrels at a training camp in central Iraq this Sunday revealed deadly nerve gas agents such as sarin and tabun. "We don't speculate. It takes days," Mr. Rumsfeld responded at a Pentagon news briefing on Monday.

"Let the thing play itself out," the top civilian official at the Pentagon stressed. The Pentagon has also not formally responded to another report that the U.S. forces had stumbled upon weapons of mass destruction — a cache of some 20 Medium Range Missiles equipped with potent chemical weapons.

This second report has come from the National Public Radio, which has attributed this to a top official of the First Marine Division. Apparently the missiles were of the BM-21 variety and were equipped with sarin and mustard gas and were "ready to fire." The official said that new intelligence data showed that the chemicals were "not just trace elements."

The cache tipped with deadly sarin and mustard gas was supposedly found by the U.S. Marines who were following the Army's 101st Airborne Division after the seizure of Saddam Hussein International Airport.

Meanwhile, there has been another television report that American troops found suspicious material while seizing and securing Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission headquarters. According to this version, troops found jars and packets of unidentified material and gas masks. Maintaining that the coalition forces have "come a long way in a short time," Mr. Rumsfeld argued that "life without Saddam Hussein is not a distant dream."

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, said a total of 85 American troops had so far been killed in the operations and another 150 wounded. He said that more than 7,000 prisoners of war were in coalition custody.

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