Word: blix
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...reminder that the Pentagon has deployed hundreds of its own personnel to find the banned weapons that had eluded UN inspectors before war. Last weekend, it was announced that the number of U.S. inspectors would be increased to 1,500 - five times the number of deployed by Dr. Hans Blix's UN team. But so far, no "smoking gun" has been found...
...Still, the absence of WMD finds and the changes in the work and composition of the inspection team has raised questions about the strength of prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. Sidelined chief UN inspector Hans Blix has taken to chortling publicly that the U.S. and Britain launched a war on the basis of "shaky intelligence...
...that the quality of their intelligence would lead troops to the illicit stockpiles fairly quickly once U.S. boots were on Iraqi soil. Now they're adjusting the picture: the Pentagon says its soldiers are no more likely to stumble over a weapons cache than top U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix was. "Things were mobile. Things were underground. Things were in tunnels. Things were hidden. Things were dispersed. Now, are we going to find that? No, it's a big country," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week. "The inspectors didn't find anything, and I doubt that we will--what...
...Local officers were authorized to make payments of $2,500 on the spot. "The White House is screaming, 'Find me some WMD,'" says a State Department official, adding that the task is one of many suddenly facing the department. Members of the Administration must feel a new bond with Blix, since they are now the ones arguing that these things take time...
Then there is the political problem. The longer the hunt takes, the Pentagon concedes, the more likely it is that skeptics will charge that whatever is eventually found was planted by the U.S. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Blix said the information the U.S. provided to his teams before the war was "pathetic." So it was not surprising when he said last week, "I think that at some stage they would like to have some credible international verification of what they find," suggesting that if the U.S. ever does uncover something, it will have to call for inspections...