Pentagon says it may have bioweapons lab

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon said Wednesday it may have recovered an Iraqi mobile biological weapons lab, the first such announcement since the start of the war to disarm the government of President Saddam Hussein.

American forces in Iraq are doing tests on a trailer that matches the description of such laboratories, given by various sources including a defector who says he helped operate one, Defense Department officials said.

"On the smoking gun, I don't know," Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone said when asked whether this was a breakthrough in the coalition search for weapons of mass destruction.

Cambone also announced that some 2,100 people will be sent to Iraq to augment the weapons hunt as well as the search for information on government leaders, terrorists, war crimes, atrocities and Iraqi prisoners of war. The effort will be headed by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Cambone said.

He said initial tests have been done on a trailer truck taken into custody April 19 at a Kurdish checkpoint in northern Iraq. It is painted in a military color scheme, was found on a transporter normally used for tanks and -- as an Iraqi defector has described Iraq's mobile labs -- contains a fermenter and a system to capture exhaust gases, he said.

"While some of the equipment on the trailer could have been used for purposes other than biological weapons agent production, U.S. and U.K. technical experts have concluded that the unit does not appear to perform any function beyond what the defector said it was for, which is the production of biological agents," Cambone said.

Type described

Cambone said that what the U.S. military has in its possession is the kind of mobile laboratory that Secretary of State Colin Powell described in a speech to the U.N. Security Council early this year in an unsuccessful attempt to get U.N. approval for the war.

"They have not found another plausible use for it," Cambone said of the trailer.

Cambone said part of the trailer was washed with a caustic material and it likely will have to be dismantled before testing can be done on hard-to-reach surfaces.

The Bush administration alleged that Iraq had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and said the main reason for the war was to destroy them. Despite weeks of searches of suspected sites, nothing conclusive has been reported found so far.

And although Pentagon officials suggested before the war that some Iraqi units were armed with chemical weapons, none were found when those units were overrun.

If proven to be a biological weapons lab, the trailer would be the first discovered in the military campaign that began March 20. On several occasions, troops have found substances they said tested initially positive as nerve agents or other chemical weapons materials, only to learn from more sophisticated testing that they were crop pesticides or explosives.

A defense official said before Cambone's press conference that he and others "feel good" about the prospect that this time they have found evidence of an unconventional weapons program.

Earlier Wednesday, Lt. Gen. William Wallace said that American forces have collected "plenty of documentary evidence" suggesting that Saddam had an active program for weapons of mass destruction.

"We've collected evidence, much of it documentary," Wallace, commander of the Army's V Corps, said from Baghdad in a videoconference with Pentagon reporters.

"A lot of the information that we're getting is coming from lower-tier Iraqis who had some knowledge of the program but not full knowledge of the program," he told Pentagon reporters in a videoconference from the Iraqi capital. "And it's just taking us a while to sort through all of that."

He did not elaborate.

Cambone said a search team of 600 in Iraq will be expanded later this month with the dispatch of what he called the Iraq Survey Group to oversee the hunt for weapons and other things the administration is looking for in Iraq.

The group headed by DIA's two-star general Dayton includes 1,300 experts and 800 support workers who will look for and analyze information on people from the regime, weapons and terrorist ties in Iraq. It also will gather information on Iraq's old intelligence services and those accused of war crimes and atrocities committed by a regime that used executions and torture to control the population.

"This is piecing together a major jigsaw puzzle, and we are only just beginning ... to work the puzzle," Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said at the press conference with Cambone.