US forces have found some old Iraqi WMD, says general

By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. military has found more
Iraqi weapons in recent months, in addition to the 500 chemical
munitions recently reported by the Pentagon, a top defense
intelligence official said on Thursday.

Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, did not specify if the newly found weapons
were also chemical munitions. But he said he expected more.

“I do not believe we have found all the weapons,” he told
the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, offering
few details in an open session that preceded a classified
briefing to lawmakers.

Responding to questions from lawmakers anxious to make
political points ahead of the November congressional elections,
U.S. defense officials said the 500 chemical weapons discovered
in Iraq were “weapons of mass destruction.” However their
degraded state may make them more dangerous to those who find
them than anyone else.

Meanwhile, the chairman of the House of Representatives
Intelligence Committee, Michigan Republican Rep. Peter
Hoekstra, wrote to U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte
accusing intelligence officials of downplaying the significance
of the finds.

Hoekstra said intelligence officials at a June 21 press
briefing told journalists the weapons predated the 1991 Gulf
War, were too degraded to be used as originally intended and
posed no threat to U.S. forces deployed in the region during
the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

“I am very disappointed by the inaccurate, incomplete, and
occasionally misleading comments made by the briefers,”
Hoekstra said in the letter.

At the Armed Services Committee, Maples also asserted that
the rockets and artillery rounds that had been found were
produced in the 1980s and could not be used as intended.

If the chemical agent, sarin, was removed from the
munitions and repackaged, it could be lethal. Its release in a
U.S. city, in certain circumstances, would be devastating,
Maples said.

LITTLE THREAT TO U.S.

But despite statements of concern by Republicans about the
risk of terrorists releasing the chemical in the United States,
defense officials said the munitions pose as much a threat to
people who try to handle them as potential victims.

When asked by a Democrat to confirm the weapons pose a risk
to troops in Iraq, not Americans at home, Maples said, “Yes.”

Republican lawmakers, some facing tough election battles
amid growing anti-war sentiment, called the discovery of the
weapons significant.

Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania suggested the
munitions were in fact the weapons of mass destruction that
former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein lied about, leading the
United States to war.

“For those who claim that these weapons are not the weapons
of mass destruction that the United States went to war over, I
would refer them to 17 United Nations Security Council
resolutions that Saddam Hussein violated,” Weldon said. “It
didn’t say pre-’91 chemical weapons. It didn’t say post-’91
chemical weapons. It said chemical weapons.”

But Democrats dismissed such arguments and said the weapons
were not the “imminent threat” used to justify the war.

“It’s very difficult to characterize these as the imminent
threat weapons that we were told we were looking for,” said
Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat.