Veterans for Common Sense

The cover of the July 28, 1967, issue of Life magazine was one of the grimmest I’d ever seen. It showed a 12-year-old black kid in filthy sneakers and worn-out jeans sprawled on the filthy pavement of a street in Newark.

His left arm was bent at a gruesome angle. Blood was pooling beneath his body. He looked dead.

The article was about the Newark riots, one of the most violent outbursts of the 1960’s.

The war in Vietnam was raging at the time. I remember staring at the magazine as I sat on a footlocker in one of the barracks at Fort Belvoir, Va. I was a very young buck sergeant who was finishing out his last few months in the service. While others were serving in Vietnam, I’d spent 14 months in South Korea. I couldn’t wait for September and my discharge to come around.

I opened the magazine, still thinking about the kid on the cover. He was like zillions of kids I had grown up with. It was sad, depressing. Then I got to Pages 20 and 21. They are still shocking to me.

There, in a sequence of photos that would go on for four pages, was a guy I had known in my hometown of Montclair, N.J., a casual friend named Billy Furr.

The sequence starts with Billy looting beer from a liquor store. Then a squad car pulls up and police officers with shotguns jump out. Billy takes off, the tails of his light-colored shirt flapping. A uniformed cop in a yellow hard hat lifts his shotgun to his shoulder, aims and fires.

In a photo that covers two-thirds of Page 22, Billy lies on the blood-stained sidewalk, dead. On the next page was another photo of the 12-year-old boy. He was a bystander who was hit in the neck and thigh. Although seriously wounded, he would recover.

This all came back to me yesterday with the news report out of Baghdad that U.S. military forces would be authorized to shoot looters on sight. The first thing I thought was that Billy Furr had been dead these 36 years because he stole some beer. It was wrong, but the barbaric punishment in no way fit the crime.

Now, in the dawn of the 21st century, when this nation above all others is supposed to be a model of progress and fairness and justice and due process, the U.S. military was to be given the high sign to start shooting Iraqis like dogs in the street.

The news article, by The Times’s Patrick Tyler, said the authorization to shoot looters on sight would be part of “a tough new security setup” that included the hiring of additional police officers and curbs on the use of high-ranking Baath Party officials in public service positions.

Mr. Tyler wrote:

“The far more muscular approach to bringing order to postwar Iraq was described by the American administrator, L. Paul Bremer, at a meeting of senior staff members [Tuesday], the officials said.”

This government, I thought, is losing its mind. I went to the computer and began to put this column together. The president, the secretary of defense, military authorities and anyone else in a position of command should know that a policy of shooting looters on sight is wrong, and if it was being considered it needed to be stopped in its tracks.

I wrote: “We are not barbarians. Our young men and women in uniform did not join the military to take on the odious mission of gunning down unarmed Iraqis in the streets. Deadly force should always be a last resort, and shooting looters on sight does not fall into that category.”

By late yesterday afternoon the administration seemed to be backing away from this crazy policy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was still doing his macho act, telling a Senate subcommittee that the forces in Baghdad “will be using muscle to see that the people who are trying to disrupt what is taking place in that city are stopped and either captured or killed.”

But Maj. Gen. Buford Blount, of the Army’s Third Infantry Division, told reporters in Baghdad that his troops “are not going to go out and shoot children” who might be stealing, say, wood or cement from a factory.

Stay tuned. This controversy is one more screaming example of the need for the U.N. to be handed the major responsibility for administering Iraq. This is not an appropriate mission for the U.S., and we’re making a hash of it already.

Americans should take a long, honest look in the mirror. We’ll find that it’s impossible to look good in the ugly garb of a colonial power.

Christian Science Monitor newspaper reporter finds high levels of radiation left by US armor-piercing shells

Baghdad, Iraq – At a roadside produce stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, business is brisk for Latifa Khalaf Hamid. Iraqi drivers pull up and snap up fresh bunches of parsley, mint leaves, dill, and onion stalks.

But Ms. Hamid’s stand is just four paces away from a burnt-out Iraqi tank, destroyed by – and contaminated with – controversial American depleted-uranium (DU) bullets. Local children play “throughout the day” on the tank, Hamid says, and on another one across the road.

No one has warned the vendor in the faded, threadbare black gown to keep the toxic and radioactive dust off her produce. The children haven’t been told not to play with the radioactive debris. They gather around as a Geiger counter carried by a visiting reporter starts singing when it nears a DU bullet fragment no bigger than a pencil eraser. It registers nearly 1,000 times normal background radiation levels on the digital readout.

The Monitor visited four sites in the city – including two randomly chosen destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles, a clutch of burned American ammunition trucks, and the downtown planning ministry – and found significant levels of radioactive contamination from the US battle for Baghdad.

In the first partial Pentagon disclosure of the amount of DU used in Iraq, a US Central Command spokesman told the Monitor that A-10 Warthog aircraft – the same planes that shot at the Iraqi planning ministry – fired 300,000 bullets. The normal combat mix for these 30-mm rounds is five DU bullets to 1 – a mix that would have left about 75 tons of DU in Iraq.

The Monitor saw only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away. There, a 3-foot-long DU dart from a 120 mm tank shell, was found producing radiation at more than 1,300 times background levels. It made the instrument’s staccato bursts turn into a steady whine.

“If you have pieces or even whole [DU] penetrators around, this is not an acute health hazard, but it is for sure above radiation protection dose levels,” says Werner Burkart, the German deputy director general for Nuclear Sciences and Applications at the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. “The important thing in any battlefield – especially in populated urban areas – is somebody has to clean up these sites.”

Minimizing the risk

Fresh-from-the-factory DU tank shells are normally handled with gloves, to minimize the health risk, and shielded with a thin coating. The alpha particle radiation emitted by DU travels less than an inch and can be stopped by cloth or even tissue paper. But when the DUmaterial burns (usually on impact; or as a dust, it can spontaneously ignite) protective shields disappear, and dangerous radioactive oxides are created that can be inhaled or ingested.

“[The risk] depends so very much on how you handle it,” says Jan Olof Snihs, of Sweden’s Radiation Protection Authority in Stockholm. In most cases dangers are low, he says, unless children eat toxic and radioactive soil, or get DU oxides on their hands.

Radioactive particles are a “special risk associated with a war,” Mr. Snihs says. “The authorities should be aware of this, and try to decontaminate places like this, just to avoid unnecessary risk.”

Pentagon officials say that DU is relatively harmless and a necessary part of modern warfare. They say that pre-Gulf War studies that indicated a risk of cancer and of causing harm to local populations through permanent contamination have been superseded by newer reports.

“There is not really any danger, at least that we know about, for the people of Iraq,” said Lt. Col. Michael Sigmon, deputy surgeon for the US Army’s V Corps, told journalists in Baghdad last week. He asserted that children playing with expended tank shells would have to eat and then practically suffocate on DU residue to cause harm.

But there is a growing chorus of concern among United Nations and relief officials, along with some Western scientific experts, who are calling for sites contaminated with DU be marked off and made safe.

“The soil around the impact sites of [DU] penetrators may be heavily contaminated, and could be harmful if swallowed by children,” says Brian Spratt, chair of the working group on DU at The Royal Society, Britain’s premier scientific institution.

Heavy metal toys?

Fragments and penetrators should be removed, since “children find them fascinating objects, and can pocket them,” says Professor Spratt. “The science says there is some danger – not perhaps a huge danger – of these objects. … We certainly do not say that these things are safe; we say that cleanup is important.”

The British Ministry of Defense says it will offer screening to soldiers suspected of DU exposure, and will publish details about locations and quantities of DU that British troops used in Iraq – a tiny fraction of that fired by US forces.

The Pentagon has traditionally been tight-lipped about DU: Official figures on the amount used were not released for years after the 1991 Gulf War and Bosnia conflicts, and nearly a year after the 1999 Kosovo campaign. No US official contacted could provide DU use estimates from the latest war in Iraq.

“The first thing we should ask [the US military] is to remove that immediately,” says Carel de Rooy, head of the UN Children’s Fund in Baghdad, adding that senior UN officials need urgent advice on avoiding exposure.

The UN Environment Program last month called for field tests. DU “is still an issue of great concern for the general public,” said UNEP chief Klaus Töpfer. “An early study in Iraq could either lay these fears to rest or confirm that there are indeed potential risks.”

US troops avoid wreckage

During the latest Iraq conflict Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and A-10 Warthog aircraft, among other military platforms, all fired the DU bullets from desert war zones to the heart of Baghdad. No other armor-piercing round is as effective against enemy tanks. While the Pentagon says there’s no risk to Baghdad residents, US soldiers are taking their own precautions in Iraq, and in some cases have handed out warning leaflets and put up signs.

“After we shoot something with DU, we’re not supposed to go around it, due to the fact that it could cause cancer,” says a sergeant in Baghdad from New York, assigned to a Bradley, who asked not to be further identified.

“We don’t know the effects of what it could do,” says the sergeant. “If one of our vehicles burnt with a DU round inside, or an ammo truck, we wouldn’t go near it, even if it had important documents inside. We play it safe.”

Six American vehicles struck with DU “friendly fire” in 1991 were deemed to be too contaminated to take home, and were buried in Saudi Arabia. Of 16 more brought back to a purpose-built facility in South Carolina, six had to be buried in a low-level radioactive waste dump.

Television footage of the war last month showed Iraqi armored vehicles burning as US columns drove by, a common sign of a strike by DU, which burns through armor on impact, and often ignites the ammunition carried by the targeted vehicle.

“We were buttoned up when we drove by that – all our hatches were closed,” the US sergeant says. “If we saw anything on fire, we wouldn’t stop anywhere near it. We would just keep on driving.”

That’s an option that produce seller Hamid doesn’t have.

She says the US broke its promise not to bomb civilians. She has found US cluster bomblets in her garden; the DU is just another dangerous burden, in a war about which she remains skeptical.

“We were told it was going to be paradise [when Saddam Hussein was toppled], and now they are killing our children,” she says voicing a common Iraqi perception about the risk of DU. “The Americans did not bother to warn us that this is a contaminated area.”

There is a warning now at the Doura intersection on the southern outskirts of Baghdad. In the days before the capital fell, four US supply trucks clustered near an array of highway off-ramps caught fire, cooking off a number of DU tank rounds.

American troops wearing facemasks for protection arrived a few days later and bulldozed the topsoil around the site to limit the contamination.

The troops taped handwritten warning signs in Arabic to the burned vehicles, which read: “Danger – Get away from this area.” These were the only warnings seen by this reporter among dozens of destroyed Iraqi armored vehicles littering the city.

“All of them were wearing masks,” says Abbas Mohsin, a teenage cousin of a drink seller 50 yards away, said referring to the US military cleanup crew. “They told the people there were toxic materials … and advised my cousin not to sell Pepsi and soft drinks in this area. They said they were concerned for our safety.”

Despite the troops’ bulldozing of contaminated earth away from the burnt vehicles, black piles of pure DU ash and particles are still present at the site. The toxic residue, if inhaled or ingested, is considered by scientists to be the most dangerous form of DU.

One pile of jet-black dust yielded a digital readout of 9,839 radioactive emissions in one minute, more than 300 times average background levels registered by the Geiger counter. Another pile of dust reached 11,585 emissions in a minute.

Western journalists who spent a night nearby on April 10, the day after Baghdad fell, were warned by US soldiers not to cross the road to this site, because bodies and unexploded ordnance remained, along with DU contamination. It was here that the Monitor found the “hot” DU tank round.

This burned dart pushed the radiation meter to the far edge of the “red zone” limit.

A similar DU tank round recovered in Saudi Arabia in 1991, that was found by a US Army radiological team to be emitting 260 to 270 millirads of radiation per hour. Their safety memo noted that the “current [US Nuclear Regulatory Commission] limit for non-radiation workers is 100 millirads per year.”

The normal public dose limit in the US, and recognized around much of the world, is 100 millirems per year. Nuclear workers have guidelines 20 to 30 times as high as that.

The depleted-uranium bullets are made of low-level radioactive nuclear-waste material, left over from the making of nuclear fuel and weapons. It is 1.7 times as dense as lead, and burns its way easily through armor. But it is controversial because it leaves a trail of contamination that has half-life of 4.5 billion years – the age of our solar system.

Less DU in this war?

In the first Gulf War, US forces used 320 tons of DU, 80 percent of it fired by A-10 aircraft. Some estimates suggest 1,000 tons or more of DU was used in the current war. But the Pentagon disclosure Wednesday that about 75 tons of A-10 DU bullets were used points to a smaller overall DU tonnage in Iraq this time.

US military guidelines developed after the first Gulf War – which have since been considerably eased – required any soldier coming within 50 yards of a tank struck with DU to wear a gas mask and full protective suit. Today, soldiers say they have been told to steer clear of any DU.

“If a [tank] was taken out by depleted uranium, there may be oxide that you don’t want to inhale. We want to minimize any exposure, at least to the lowest level possible,” Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official told journalists on March 14, just days before the war began. “If somebody needs to go into a tank that’s been hit with depleted uranium, a dust mask, a handkerchief is adequate to protect them – washing their hands afterwards.”

Not everyone on the battlefield may be as well versed in handling DU, Dr. Kilpatrick said, noting that his greater concern is DU’s chemical toxicity, not its radioactivity: “What we worry about like lead in paint in housing areas – children picking it up and eating it or licking it – getting it on their hands and ingesting it.”

In the US, stringent NRC rules govern any handling of DU, which can legally only be disposed of in low-level radioactive waste dumps. The US military holds more than a dozen NRC licenses to work with it.

In Iraq, DU was not just fired at armored targets.

Video footage from the last days of the war shows an A-10 aircraft – a plane purpose-built around a 30-mm Gatling gun – strafing the Iraqi Ministry of Planning in downtown Baghdad.

A visit to site yields dozens of spent radioactive DU rounds, and distinctive aluminum casings with two white bands, that drilled into the tile and concrete rear of the building. DU residue at impact clicked on the Geiger counter at a relatively low level, just 12 times background radiation levels.

Hot bullets

But the finger-sized bullets themselves – littering the ground where looters and former staff are often walking – were the “hottest” items the Monitor measured in Iraq, at nearly 1,900 times background levels.

The site is just 300 yards from where American troops guard the main entrance of the Republican Palace, home to the US and British officials tasked with rebuilding Iraq.

“Radioactive? Oh, really?” asks a former director general of the ministry, when he returned in a jacket and tie for a visit last week, and heard the contamination levels register in bursts on the Geiger counter.

“Yesterday more than 1,000 employees came here, and they didn’t know anything about it,” the former official says. “We have started to not believe what the American government says. What I know is that the occupiers should clean up and take care of the country they invaded.”

US military officials often say that most people are exposed to natural or “background” radiation n daily life. For example, a round-trip flight across the US can yield a 5 millirem dose from increased cosmic radiation; a chest X-ray can yield a 10 millirem dose in a few seconds.

The Pentagon says that, since DU is “depleted” and 40 percent less radioactive than normal uranium, it presents even less of a hazard.

But DU experts say they are most concerned at how DU is transformed on the battlefield, after burning, into a toxic oxide dust that emits alpha particles. While those can be easily stopped by the skin, once inside the body, studies have shown that they can destroy cells in soft tissue. While one study on rats linked DU fragments in muscle tissue to increased cancer risk, health effects on humans remain inconclusive.

As late as five days before the Iraq war began, Pentagon officials said that 90 of those troops most heavily exposed to DU during the 1991 Gulf War have shown no health problems whatsoever, and remain under close medical scrutiny.

Released documents and past admissions from military officials, however, estimate that around 900 Americans were exposed to DU. Only a fraction have been watched, and among those has been one diagnosed case of lymphatic cancer, and one arm tumor. As reported in previous articles, the Monitor has spoken to American veterans who blame their DU exposure for serious health problems.

The politics of DU

But DU health concerns are very often wrapped up in politics. Saddam Hussein’s regime blamed DU used in 1991 for causing a spike in the cancer rate and birth defects in southern Iraq.

And the Pentagon often overstates its case – in terms of DU effectiveness on the battlefield, or declaring the absence of health problems, according to Dan Fahey, an American veterans advocate who has monitored the shrill arguments from both sides since the mid-1990s.

“DU munitions are neither the benign wonder weapons promoted by Pentagon propagandists nor the instruments of genocide decried by hyperbolic anti-DU activists,” Mr. Fahey writes in a March report, called “Science or Science Fiction: Facts, Myth and Propaganda in the Debate Over DU Weapons.”

Nonetheless, Rep. Jim McDermott (D) of Washington, a doctor who visited Baghdad before the war, introduced legislation in Congress last month requiring studies on health and environment studies, and clean up of DU contamination in the US. He says DU may well be associated with increased birth defects.

“While the political effects of using DU munitions are perhaps more apparent than their health and environmental effects,” Fahey writes, “science and common sense dictate it is unwise to use a weapon that distributes large quantities of a toxic waste in areas where people live, work, grow food, or draw water.”

Because of the publicity the Iraqi government has given to the issue, Iraqis worry about DU.

“It is an important concern…. We know nothing about it. How can I protect my family?” asks Faiz Askar, an Iraqi doctor. “We say the war is finished, but what will the future bring?”

So now we are told by President Bush that the hostilities against Iraq have drawn to a close. Now, we’re told, with an imperious wave of the arm, this chapter has ended. And Americans are meant to feel closure and satisfaction over an event that few of us have been given much insight into.

From the buildup for the war to the bombing to the final days, Washington has constructed a simple, heroic narrative of freedom and asked us to ignore the much messier human devastation and tragedies of this war — stories that, sadly, have little to do with the heroic legend. There are angry outbursts against America across the Middle East, and most Americans have almost no idea why.

Trying to get the story straight on any of these recent events has been incredibly difficult. This war supposedly came about because Iraq has been hiding weapons of mass destruction. And yet the war has come and gone, revealing no such threatening cache. Saddam Hussein, it seems, has eluded capture. And another narrative — linking Hussein, on an almost subconscious level in the American psyche, with Osama bin Laden — has been fostered in the media in a deliberate attempt to justify and bolster support for the war. One fighter pilot said in a TV interview that flying over New York City reminded him of why we were in this war. And yet this connection is an artificial creation, maintained by the media and supported through innuendo and rumor — playing on Americans’ fears and revenge fantasies.

Our news programming has been instrumental in the marketing of this war, as I can attest from my own experience with the media. Because I’ve written about Iraqis in America, the interviewers turn their questions to the war on Iraq, but it’s clear that they’re interested in specific sorts of answers. One journalist who repeatedly asked me about “Arab rage” and the “innate Arab hatred of America” openly scoffed when I said that actually I’ve found that Arabs tend to admire Americans and American culture.

When I said on one radio show that I’ve traveled throughout the Middle East as an American, with American friends, and have felt nothing from the Arabs but friendship and hospitality, I received an e-mail from one listener who wrote, “Don’t you know that Arabs hate us? It’s all over the news.”

Of course, if Arabs are systematically portrayed as an essentially hate-filled people, that makes the marketing of a very expensive war and occupation much easier to manage.

Recently such publications as Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and Time featured glorious covers and photo spreads documenting images of jolly GIs playing Ping-Pong in Saddam Hussein’s palace, and supposedly joyous Iraqis throwing their arms around American soldiers. The alternative media, weeklies, online sites and foreign news services (which are often cast in the role of villain) offer a much grimmer picture of this war — but how many of us have time to read as widely as we want to or need to? Why should we, when Fox News regularly tells us that its news coverage is “fair and balanced” — a motto that’s just vague enough to include nearly any sort of political agenda?

And indeed, at a recent press conference, Gen. Tommy Franks, commenting on the firing of reporter Peter Arnett, stated that the news should be “fair and balanced.” Afterward, the Fox anchor underscored Frank’s comment, as if to tell viewers that the network had now been approved by the U.S. military. It seems to me that this is a development that should chill the blood of any truly objective journalist. Do we really want our news to be dictated by our military? Do we want it to be dictated by any one special interest group, or even by one side of a question?

In an op-ed piece in October, I urged readers to be courageous and direct in expressing their feelings and questions about Iraq. I was inundated with e-mails from people telling me about their fear of doing just that. Over and over people spoke of their fear of being labeled un-American, unpatriotic or, more recently, of being accused of not supporting the troops. This is not the sign of a free society.

This fearfulness strikes me as pernicious, because variety, complexity, even contradiction are signs of strength — in a person, in a family and certainly in a nation. Now we are presented not only with our own private fears but with the shrinking of our own media. If the world is ever going to close the fatal cracks opening up between nations and peoples, it’s crucial that we start questioning the omnipotence of our mainstream media, for all of us to ask for more searching queries about the true effectiveness of war and occupation, and to demand — of our media, our writers, our scholars and leaders — a narrative of Iraq and the United States that is more than a small sliver of the true story.

America was good at conquering Iraq, but is not good at governing it and may prove worse at shaping its future, so clueless it seems about Iraqi political aspirations. Four weeks after the capture of Baghdad, there are few signs of the restoration of law and order or essential services.

Hospitals are, in fact, in worse shape than during the war, says the Red Cross.

About the only security and social benefits available are being provided not by the 135,000 Anglo-American troops but by tribal leaders in the rural areas and clerics in the urban centres.

About the only humanitarian aid extended, beyond the first choreographed arrival of the British ship Sir Galahad, has come from Iran, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

The oft-cited reason for the American failure on the civilian front is that Saddam Hussein’s regime collapsed quicker than expected. While true, it does not cover up the real reasons:

* There was no coherent post-war plan.

* The Bush administration, having worked mainly with Iraqi exile groups, totally misread post-Saddam Iraq, just as the Kennedy administration got misled by Cuban exiles over the Bay of Pigs.

* Washington has been distracted by two political battles: the Pentagon fighting the State Department on who controls Iraq, and both, together, resisting any useful role by the United Nations.

Given its vast experience in building post-war societies, the U.N. would arguably have done a better job by now than the U.S.

Petty and vindictive, George W. Bush is also freezing out France, Russia and Germany at a time when Iraq can use all the international assistance it can get.

Also, the Canadian offer of Mounties, police officers, transport planes and humanitarian aid is yet to be taken up.

The welcome toppling of Saddam has receded in Iraqi consciousness under the burden of the invasion itself, with its inevitable civilian deaths, injuries and dislocation; the weeks of chaos right under the noses of American and British troops; and the American preoccupation with finding pliant leaders.

Caught flat-footed with the assertiveness of the majority Shiites, especially their religiosity and nationalism, Washington has reacted by lashing out at “Iranian agents” and by speeding up the process of forming an indigenous government before unfriendly forces become too strong.

Four of five Iraqis named to a core group by U.S. administrator Jay Garner (where are the women, general?) are decidedly pro-American.

They are: Kurdish leaders Jalal Talebani and Massoud Barzani (well-deserved choices), Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress and Iyad Alawi of the Iraqi National Accord, another exile group.

The latter two are secularist Shias, while most Iraqi Shiites are not. Three clerical factions are vying to represent the faithful. Yet only one, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Iran-based Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has been included.

This may prove problematic. Shiite clerics have clearly shown themselves to have moral authority and a mass following. Many have filled the post-Saddam vacuum and now control several key institutions.

The candidate most liked by the Americans is the least liked by Iraqis. Chalabi, who left Iraq as a child in 1958, was flown back by the Pentagon which has assigned him a military liaison officer and helped train his 600-strong militia.

Granted, inventing a government out of the chaos of a fallen regime is not easy. Also, having taken control of a country — ignore the debate on the right or wrong of the invasion — America is not going to hand it over to forces inimical to it, or its regional ally, Israel. Still, whatever it does must be credible.

America dreads religious Muslim politicians. (Never mind Bush’s own religiosity in “fighting evil” and invoking God’s blessings over his warmongering).

But elbowing out religious Shiites is asking for trouble. Look at Algeria and Egypt, where the sidelining of moderate Islamists led to the rise of militants — and much murderous mayhem.

In fact, Iraqis, themselves, used to be the most secular of Arabs until Saddam persecuted them, particularly the Shiites, and they turned to religion. It would be ironic and tragic if they were to conclude that their liberators are squelching their aspirations.

Some clerics are calling for an Islamic state. Others are wary of the Iranian model. Still others want a Muslim democracy, like the Jewish democracy of Israel. The debate has just begun. Stifling it is the worst possible step.

About 350 delegates representing a cross-section of Iraq’s various ethnic and religious groups are to meet in a month. They would select an interim government that would arrange elections in a year or two under a new constitution.

The process ahead has to be transparently honest. If done right, this experiment in democracy can indeed set the example Bush claims to want for all Arabs. If done badly, it could come back to haunt America.

Haroon Siddiqui is The Star’s editorial page editor emeritus. His column appears Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca

The topic is featured regularly on the covers of national newsmagazines, is discussed in popular books and is celebrated on newspaper op-ed pages.

In fact, some of those who once shied from the word “empire,” even as they advocated policies to that effect, now embrace the label with varying degrees of fervor.

”We need to err on the side of being strong,” says Bill Kristol, the neoconservative editor of the Weekly Standard and chairman of the Project for a New American Century. ”And if people want to say we’re an imperial power, fine.”

That newfound candor reflects two realities. First, the fiction that we are not an empire had simply become impossible to sustain, and not merely because we now occupy Iraq. Just last week, news broke that the United States would be building new military bases in Romania, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria, all former Warsaw Pact nations.

In addition, we already have troops in more than 130 nations by the Pentagon’s unofficial count, permanent bases in roughly 40 of those countries and basing rights in many more, with ambitions to expand still further into places such as the Philippines and even Vietnam.

Second, in the warm and fuzzy aftermath of military victory in Iraq, the need to be coy about our intentions has evaporated. Triumph has a way of making people feel, well, triumphant. Many who previously shrank from the concept of empire now find it attractive; many who found it attractive but feared public reaction now feel free to be more honest.

It is fair to say, however, that this reality has caught most Americans unprepared, and for good reason. In the case of Iraq, we were sold war against Saddam Hussein on many different grounds, including an alleged close link with al-Qaida that has yet to be documented and the alleged presence of hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons, none of them yet found.

In reality, it is now clear that we fought this war to place ourselves in the midst of the Middle East in a very big way. In part, we hoped to try to “drain the swamp” of Islamic terrorism. In part, we were motivated by concern for our oil supply.

As a report by the Project for a New American Century stated in September 2000, “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

The true scope of U.S. ambitions to remake the Middle East in our image was never articulated beforehand to the American people. As a result, the Bush administration has committed this country to a major international obligation without having the “buy-in” of the American people needed to support it.

Even the administration itself seems torn by the resulting schizophrenia, rhetorically embracing the difficult work ahead while shrinking from the actual task itself.

While the president notes that “the transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort,” administration officials admit that they don’t have enough troops in Iraq to maintain order today, and talk in terms of reducing troop levels by 75 percent — to roughly 30,000 — by the fall.

While Pentagon officials acknowledge that our military manpower is stretched thin by Iraq and the demands of empire elsewhere, we obstinately refuse to ease that burden by inviting the United Nations to help in policing Iraq.

And while we boast with good reason about the high-tech weaponry fielded by our military, at last report the civilian Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Baghdad doesn’t even have working telephones almost a month after we occupied the city.

We are, in other words, a half-hearted empire, pleased with the power and prestige it brings but unwilling to spend the money, time and manpower to manage it. And half-hearted empires have a very short life expectancy.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor, jbookman@ajc.com

The report released Thursday said it is likely that at least 41,000 service members may have been overexposed to combinations of pest strips, sprayed pesticides and fly baits during the 1991 war.

The conclusions were reached after the department’s Deployment Health directorate conducted 900 interviews with veterans, including preventive medicine personnel. Of those interviewed, about 322 had
specific information related to pesticide exposure, the Pentagon said.

The report is final “because no new information has been received to change the findings and assessments of the previous report,” said a statement accompanying the report.

Barbara Goodno, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the report was an update of a report released in January 2001.

Steve Robinson, an advocate for Gulf War veterans, said the findings were news to him and other veterans. “Had these conclusions been released then we would have all talked about it,” he said.

When the 2001 report was announced, Bernard Rostker, then head of the Pentagon’s Gulf War illness office, said a link between pesticide exposures and the soldiers’ illnesses could not be established, although
he could not exclude the possibility that some pesticides caused health problems.

Robinson, who runs the National Gulf War Resource Center, said the conclusions in the report further affirm veterans’ long-held beliefs that exposures to toxic substances in the Gulf may be partly to blame
for their illnesses.

Thousands of veterans returned from the first Gulf War complaining of a variety of illness that included chronic fatigue, diarrhea, migraines, dizziness, memory problems and in some cases Lou Gehrig’s disease, a debilitating, neurological illness.

Many veterans have been distrustful of government research on the illnesses because they were first widely attributed to stress.

Robinson said the inconclusive findings in the report are an argument for why keeping accurate health information on soldiers before, during and after their deployment.

Of the 41,000, at least 30,500 soldiers may have been at elevated risk for short-term health effects because of exposure to pest strips. Another group of about 7,000 may have been exposed to pesticides applied
during spraying operations and about 3,500 to 4,500 pesticide applicators were “probably one of the more highly pesticide-exposed groups,” the Pentagon said.

In addition to the interviews, the Pentagon report is based on information from a review of scientific literature by the RAND Corp. research firm and a survey of Gulf War veterans the firm conducted.

But for Harper’s magazine publisher John MacArthur, that same image of U.S. military victory is also indicative of a propaganda campaign being waged by the Bush administration.

“It was absolutely a photo-op created for (U.S. President George W.) Bush’s re-election campaign commercials,” MacArthur, a self-appointed authority on U.S. government propaganda, said in an interview. “CNN, MSNBC and Fox swallowed it whole.”

In 1992, MacArthur wrote “Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War,” a withering critique of government and media actions that he says misled the public after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

In MacArthur’s opinion, little has changed during the latest Iraq war, prompting him to begin work on an updated edition of “Second Front.” U.S. government public relations specialists are still concocting bogus stories to serve government interests, he says, and credulous journalists stand ready to scarf up the baloney.

“The concept of a self-governing American republic has been crippled by this propaganda,” MacArthur said. “The whole idea that we can govern ourselves and have an intelligent debate, free of cant, free of disinformation, I think it’s dead.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied the existence of any administration propaganda campaign and predicted the American public would reject such notions as ridiculous.

A Pentagon spokesman also denied high-level planning in the appearance of the American flag in Baghdad. “It sure looked spontaneous to me,” said Marine Lt. Col. Mike Humm.

In fact, a recent survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that Americans were happy with Iraq war coverage, though many wanted less news coverage of anti-war activism and fewer TV appearances by former military officers.

But MacArthur insists that both Gulf wars have been marked by phony tales calculated to deceive public opinion at crucial junctures.

BABIES AND BOMBS

On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, Americans were asked to believe that Iraqi soldiers tossed Kuwaiti infants from hospital incubators, leaving them to die. Not true, he says.

This time, MacArthur says the Bush administration made false claims about Iraqi nuclear weapons, charging Baghdad was trying to import aluminum tubes to make enriched uranium and that the country was six months from building a warhead.

The International Atomic Energy Agency found those tubes were for artillery rockets, not nuclear weapons. And MacArthur says a supposed IAEA report, on which the White House based claims about Iraqi weapons-making ability, did not exist.

“What’s changed is that there’s no shame anymore in doing it directly,” MacArthur, 46, said of what he views as blatant White House and Pentagon propaganda campaigns.

Cynthia Kennard, assistant professor at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, said the Bush administration has mastered the art of building favorable public images and shaping messages to suit its own interests.

“It’s put the journalism profession in somewhat of a paralysis,” said Kennard, a former CBS correspondent who covered the 1991 Gulf War. “This is not a particularly glowing moment for tough questions and enterprise reporting.”

As Harper’s publisher, MacArthur oversees a 153-year-old political and literary magazine he helped save from financial ruin 20 years ago with money from the foundation named for his billionaire grandparents, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur.

While MacArthur accuses news outlets generally of avoiding opposition stands, his own magazine has been vitriolic toward Bush, describing the president in its May issue as a leader who “counts his ignorance as a virtue and regards his lack of curiosity as a sign of moral strength.”

MURDOCH’S CIRCUS

But MacArthur is not troubled by the thumping patriotism displayed by cable TV news outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, which leads CNN and MSNBC in viewer ratings.

“All that means is that Murdoch knows how to run a circus better than anyone else. War and jingoism always sell. But the real damage was done by the high-brow press,” MacArthur said.

“On the propaganda side, the New York Times is more responsible for making the case for war than any other newspaper or any other news organization.”

He blames the Times for giving credence to Bush administration claims about the aluminum tubes. And when Bush cited a nonexistent IAEA report on Iraqi nukes, he says, it was the conservative Washington Times — not the New York Times or Washington Post — that wound up refuting the assertion.

The New York Times also reported an Iraqi scientist told U.S. officials that Saddam destroyed chemical and biological equipment and sent weapons to Syria just before the war.

The only trouble, MacArthur says, is that the Times did not speak to or name the scientist but agreed to delay the story, submit the text to government scrutiny and withhold details — facts the Times acknowledged in its article. “You might as well just run a press release. Let the government write it. That’s Pravda,” he said.

Times spokesman Toby Usnik dismissed MacArthur’s claims regarding the Times’ war coverage as a whole: “We believe we have covered the story from all sides and all angles.”

Fox had no comment on his remarks.

Editors across the nation also worked hard to avoid the grisly images of war, especially scenes of dead Iraqi civilians and Americans, while Europeans saw uncensored horrific images.

The Pentagon’s decision to embed journalists with U.S. forces produced war footage that the 1991 war sorely lacked. But the coverage rarely rose to the standard MacArthur wanted.

“Ninety percent of what we got was junk … I think probably 5 or 10 percent of it was pretty good,” he said.

MacArthur says the character of the news media, and the government’s attitude toward it, was best summed up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a Pentagon “town hall” meeting.

Asked by an audience member what could be done to reverse the media’s “overwhelmingly negative” war coverage, Rumsfeld said: “You know, penalize the papers and the television … that don’t give good advice and reward those people that do give good advice.”

MacArthur said that translated as: “You punish the critics and you reward your friends. That’s what he means. That’s the standard currency of Washington journalism … To show reality becomes unpatriotic, in effect.”

But the Pentagon’s Lt. Col. Humm said Rumsfeld had not been talking about unfavorable reporting but about inaccurate reporting. “It is Department of Defense policy with regard to working with the media that we do not penalize or reward for the nature of what they report on,” he said. “The standards we demand and expect are professional standards of conduct.”

Last week as the U.S. began pulling troops out of the Middle East, the Pentagon announced that it did not intend to tally the Iraqi civilian death toll. After weeks of boasting that the precision of our increasingly high-tech arsenal actually spares civilian lives, Pentagon officials admitted that they don’t have the time, or the inclination, to assess collateral damage.

“We really don’t know how many civilian deaths there have been,” Colin Powell told the BBC. “And we don’t know how many of them can be attributed to coalition action, as opposed to action on the part of Iraqi armed forces as they defended themselves.”

If at first Powell’s statement seems more candid than past rhetoric surrounding the war’s toll on Iraqi civilians, consider that no one involved in the discussion–not the secretary of state, not the generals, and not Congress’s fair-weather humanitarians–has been willing to confront the idea that the civilian death toll may not be evident for years, or generations.

Many of those high-tech munitions, you see, contain depleted uranium, a radioactive metal associated with a long list of rare and gruesome illnesses and birth defects. For the last month, we’ve pelted Iraqis with literally tons of the stuff. And while the precision with which we sent the warheads smashing into their targets did make it seem at times as if we could indeed excise a despot and his evil minions relatively cleanly, the truth is that we’ve also salted a wide swath of the cradle of civilization with a dust that will be toxic for some 4.5 billion years.

Just like their DOD cohorts, executives at Alliant Techsystems, based in Edina, like to suggest that their “smarter” bombs make war a more humane enterprise. Alliant is the U.S. Army’s leading supplier of munitions, and has sold millions of DU penetrators to the Army and Air Force. Many were manufactured in New Brighton and stored in Elk River; depleted uranium is one of the toxins currently being scoured from the company’s now-shuttered Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant, a Superfund site.

From a military standpoint, depleted uranium is the holy grail of raw materials. Forged from the waste generated by nuclear power plants, it’s incredibly heavy–1.7 times as heavy as lead–and especially well suited to making warhead penetrators, the sheaths that allow bombs and other ordnance to pierce heavily armored tanks or thick-walled bunkers. As a lethal bonus, this extraordinary density gives the metal peerless kinetic energy: DU penetrators ignite on impact, creating a burning, radioactive cloud. Used as armor, it makes our tanks virtually impervious. The M1 Abrams tank is the ultimate DU success story; it is protected by a sheath of depleted uranium armor and fires only DU-tipped shells.

Depleted uranium made its combat debut during the first Gulf War, when we spent some 320 tons of armor-piercing bullets and shells in both Iraq and Kuwait. The warheads worked so well that they were employed in smaller quantities in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Independent weapons experts are convinced we used far more of it this time around in Iraq–and in far larger weapons, including 2,000-pound air-to-ground cruise missiles and the so-called bunker busters.

Tungsten and titanium, the only metals even close to being effective substitutes, don’t penetrate their targets with nearly as much strength. And their sky-high cost is prohibitive. By contrast, upwards of a billion pounds of depleted uranium is just lying around in piles that we can’t figure out how to get rid of. The U.S. government is happy to give it away.

Given the metal’s military uses, it’s not hard to understand how the Pentagon brass can continue to keep straight faces while insisting that DU isn’t toxic. Yet since Gulf War I a slow, steady accretion of evidence has begun to suggest that it is in fact a very indiscriminate killer.

For starters, even in its “depleted” state, DU is still 40 percent as radioactive as regular uranium and has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. When it ignites, it leaves behind microscopic radioactive oxides–a nasty dust that settles in soil, in the water table, or, most tragically, in people’s lungs. Unexploded DU penetrators are offenders in their own right: The material is highly corrosive, and buried shells lose 25 percent of their mass within seven years of impact.

Iraqi health officials have claimed that the number of cancer cases among Iraqi children has risen fivefold since 1990, while the overall cancer rate is up 38 percent. Birth defects and leukemia have tripled. It’s hard to know whether Iraq’s complaints are credible: The International Atomic Energy Agency has supposedly refused to allow Iraq to acquire the radiology equipment necessary to study DU, arguing that the technology might aid in the development of nuclear weapons. Kuwait was pelted with the warheads, too, but can’t provide many clues: DU was not dropped in its cities and following the first war Kuwaitis launched a massive, well-funded cleanup.

But it’s not just an Iraqi problem. A growing number of U.S. veterans believe it is the cause of their Gulf War Syndrome, the controversial cluster of symptoms which scientists now believe was caused by battlefield exposure to numerous toxins during the first Gulf War. Also, similar illnesses, including clusters of unusual cancers, have been reported in Bosnia and Kosovo. Following the deaths of several peacekeepers, many NATO member nations mounted an unsuccessful campaign to outlaw DU weapons.

The U.S. military seems to have taken a two-pronged approach to hanging on to its bunker-busters. The first tack is to blame the enemy. In a Pentagon briefing held in the days before the start of the war, Col. James Naughton of the U.S. Army Materiel Command insisted claims that Iraqis are suffering a variety of bizarre cancers and other illnesses traceable to DU are nothing more than propaganda. “They want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them,” he said.

The military’s second strategy appears to be to refuse to do any research into DU’s toxicity and–in a charmingly Orwellian touch–to justify this decision by insisting that there’s no evidence of a problem. To date the feds have taken just one formal look at DU, by tracking the health of several dozen Gulf War vets who were hit by depleted uranium shrapnel when their DU-armored tanks were hit by friendly fire. But most non-U.S. experts agree that the toxin’s real potential for injury is via inhalation or ingestion. And most Defense Department and Veterans Administration researchers who wanted to press the matter have found themselves out of jobs.

Last month, even as the U.S. was pelting Baghdad with the latest generation of DU weapons, a United Nations Environment Programme report found that depleted uranium from weapons used in Bosnia and Herzegovina can still be found in that country’s drinking water and in dust particles suspended in the air. The research was funded not by the United States but by the governments of Italy and Switzerland.

But let’s return to the topic of the civilian death toll for a moment, because there’s a lesson here as to how we got desensitized to our own weapons of mass destruction. It’s quite simple, really: The higher the number, the less able Americans are to muster any outrage. For the first week after the U.S. invaded Iraq, we were treated to compelling accounts of the deaths of individual Iraqis or small groups, such as the seven women and children killed at a Marine checkpoint. But as the collateral damage mounted, we lost interest.

On March 26, a week into the conflict, the military’s precision weaponry misfired and the U.S. bombed a Baghdad market, instantly killing 35. That earned lots of headlines, including some that told of the United States’ feeble attempt to pin the bombing on the Iraqis. But by the following day, when bombs were falling on residential neighborhoods throughout the city, we seemed to have exorcised any thoughts of wringing our hands over the losses.

Juxtapose these numbers against another set–one Americans fixate on quite readily. March 26, the day the U.S. bombed that Baghdad market, was a pretty decent day for Alliant Techsystems, which had seen its stock plummet from a high a year ago of nearly $80 per share to as low as $43. That day, buoyed by news that the war wasn’t going to be won in just a few days, its stock jumped from $52.60 to $54.60. “People thought it would be a five-day or ten-day war, but it’s going to be a long war,” one defense stock analyst explained to Reuters. “We’re firing off a lot of missiles, using helicopters, ordnance. Whatever we use, we have to replace.”

Restocking the nation’s ordnance supply could provide little more than a momentary boost for the company, other analysts cautioned. In the long term, they say, they are far more interested in Alliant’s attempts to develop more of those high-tech precision-guided weapons. As of this writing, the company’s stock is hovering between $49 and $50 per share.

By the time U.S. troops took Baghdad, some 1,250 civilians had been killed, according to what remained of Iraq’s public health apparatus. As a statistic, it’s curiously meaningless. Does anyone remember how many civilians died during the first Gulf War? In Afghanistan? In Vietnam, even? Of course not, it’s the really big numbers we can’t seem to face. Little wonder, then, that we have no interest in determining how many people have become victims of that conflict in the intervening years and how many will die slow, untelevised deaths in the years to come.

Veterans’ advocacy groups say the blood tests could have helped the Pentagon track down the causes behind the variety of ailments, collectively known as Gulf war syndrome, that affect about 100,000 of the 700,000 veterans who served in the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait.

Sens. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, and Jack Reed, Rhode Island Democrat, contend the medical tests are required under a law that went into effect in 1998.

Mr. Reed said funds for the blood sampling were available from a discretionary fund within the Defense Department, and he sent a letter to William Winkenwerder, assistant defense secretary for health affairs, on Jan. 24, requesting the Pentagon use $1.5 million from a $50 million discretionary fund established to support medical research, including Gulf war illnesses, to pay for the tests.

“We should provide our departing servicemen and women with every safeguard that our nation can muster,” Mr. Reed wrote.

Mr. Winkenwerder’s office has not yet replied to Mr. Reed’s office.

“We’re still waiting for Mr. Winkenwerder to say yes or no. Every time we talk to these folks they say a response is forthcoming,” said Adam Bozzi, a spokesman for Mr. Reed.

A defense spokesman said Mr. Winkenwerder was never notified of the letter.

“It’s kind of a busy time. Maybe you don’t have a feel for how much congressional correspondence comes in and out of here every day,” said Austin Camacho, with the deployment health support directorate.

Mr. Reed expressed his frustration at the DoD’s lack of response.

“I’m disappointed. This is common sense,” Mr. Reed said. “I just don’t think they have a good answer for why they haven’t followed the law, conducted predeployment physicals, and why they seem to be less than enthusiastic about collecting this data.”

Mr. Kerry on March 6 asked the General Accounting Office to start an investigation into the Defense Department’s force health protection plan. The GAO responded and is investigating.

Roughly 100,000 of the 700,000 U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf war have reported chronic pain or illness, with about 30 percent of that number requiring hospitalization. Symptoms include headaches, joint pain, fatigue, skin rashes and sores, difficulty concentrating and memory loss, chronic diarrhea, and gastrointestinal trouble. Studies also have shown a higher rate of Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative disease of the central nervous system characterized by muscle weakness, among Gulf war veterans.

Some veterans feel the illnesses could be related to stress, the vaccinations service members receive and exposure to chemicals like sarin and radioactive materials like depleted uranium. But no one is certain of the causes.

“The mystery of the Gulf war is that there was no data collected. If there was, we would have been able to rule in and rule out why soldiers were getting ill. Now, it’s 12 years later and we’re making the same mistakes,” said Steve Robinson, a Gulf war veteran and executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.

“After the debacle of the first Gulf war, why they would risk not answering this question now is beyond me. ‘We don’t know’ is not going to cut it this time,” said Mr. Robinson. “If people do get sick, they won’t be able to throw up their hands this time.”

Researchers proposed to take blood samples before and after troops were vaccinated, and then compare those samples with samples taken upon their return and for four years afterward. The Department of Defense currently has no such study or system of testing in place, despite having spent $212 million for 224 scientific studies on the subject.

The current requirement is that each deployed service member must have had HIV testing in the last 12 months, and the blood serum from that test is kept on file.

The samples from the study would have provided baseline data for a group of researchers led by retired Brig. Gen. Richard Valente, who is also chief of the Rhode Island Gulf War Commission.

Dr. Paul Levine, an epidemiologist and biostatistician at George Washington University, is the lead investigator on the research team. Much of the work the tests are based on was done in the late ’90s by Dr. David Haines, a Fairfax epidemiologist who served as a chemical officer during the Gulf war and has suffered from psoriasis and other symptoms.

The tests by Gen. Valente’s group would not have prevented sicknesses. They reportedly would have provided a set of reliable data that medical researchers could use to find causes of the mysterious illnesses.

The Department of Defense came under fire recently for not complying with a 1998 law requiring that a medical screening be conducted on each deploying service member. Instead of drawing blood samples before and after deployment, the DoD issues a questionnaire to each service member.

“Hunt for Iraqi Arms Erodes Assumptions”

Camp Doha, Kuwait – With little to show after 30 days, the Bush administration is losing confidence in its prewar belief that it had strong clues pointing to the whereabouts of weapons of mass destruction concealed in Iraq, according to planners and participants in the hunt.

After testing some — though by no means all — of their best leads, analysts here and in Washington are increasingly doubtful that they will find what they are looking for in the places described on a five-tiered target list drawn up before fighting began. Their strategy is shifting from the rapid “exploitation” of known suspect sites to a vast survey that will rely on unexpected discoveries and leads.

Late last week, the U.S. Central Command began moving urgently to expand security around a wider range of facilities in an effort to preserve evidence that defense officials fear is melting away. That imperative grew from intelligence suggesting that Iraqi insiders have stolen files, electronic data and equipment from nonconventional arms programs under the cover of recent looting. Analysts said they believe that former Iraqi officials hope to conceal their culpability, barter for status with the U.S. military government or sell the technology for private gain.

If such weapons or the means of making them have been removed from the centralized control of former Iraqi officials, high-ranking U.S. officials acknowledged, then the war may prove to aggravate the proliferation threat that President Bush said he fought to forestall.

“It’s a danger,” Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said in a telephone interview. There are signs, he said, “that some of the looting is actually strategic.” Former Baath Party and Iraqi government officials appear to be “doing at least some of the looting” of government facilities, he said, “including those that might have records or materials” relating to weapons of mass destruction.

Bush launched and justified the war with a flat declaration of knowledge “that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.” Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who took the lead public role in defending that proposition, said, among other particulars, that “our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons” agents.

Political appointees and career analysts alike, including some who were privately skeptical of the need for war, continue to express confidence that U.S. forces eventually will find stocks of chemical and biological arms, ballistic missile components and equipment and plans for uranium enrichment. A top planner said they have many leads left to pursue, including “tens” of the roughly 100 targets on the U.S. government’s top tier of a five-tiered list. But arms hunters now pin their best hopes on what they call “ad hoc sites,” to be discovered by happenstance or with help of Iraqis who volunteer information or divulge it under interrogation.

One such example came over the weekend, officials here said, when investigators interviewed an Iraqi scientist south of Baghdad. They said the scientist told them he took part in chemical weapons development and that Iraq had destroyed some weapons only days before the war began. He led them to samples of chemicals that the U.S. search team described as ingredients for lethal agents. But military officials would not identify the scientist, the lethal agents or the ingredients that were found. They did not permit a New York Times reporter, who was accompanying the search team and was the first to report the discovery, to interview the scientist.

Without further details of the find, experts said, its significance cannot be assessed. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was careful yesterday to draw no conclusion about it, saying he had “nothing to add” to the field report and that investigators have an “obligation of analyzing things and doing it in an orderly, disciplined way.” Experts said nearly any ingredient for a chemical weapon can also be used for civilian purposes.

Because ad hoc discoveries might occur anywhere, the U.S. military is racing belatedly to lock down files and equipment at scores of potentially sensitive facilities in Baghdad that went unguarded in the chaotic days immediately after the fall of Hussein. Beginning late last week, U.S. combat forces in the Iraqi capital moved to take custody of all 23 government ministries and more than two dozen other locations they said might yield valuable intelligence.

Senior U.S. officials with responsibility over postwar Iraq were highly critical of the delay in securing those facilities. One official interviewed in Kuwait described it as “the barn-door phenomenon.” He said retired Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, the occupation governor of Iraq, sought special protection for 10 Iraqi ministries, identifying them as potential repositories of weapons data, but that only the Oil Ministry remained intact after U.S. ground forces took possession of Baghdad. Combat commanders, the official said, gave “insufficient priority to getting into these places,” and “there wasn’t enough force to accomplish that initial sequestering of buildings and records.”

Defense Department planners, meanwhile, are diverting some of their best investigative resources away from the target sites they came to Iraq to explore. Two of the four mobile exploitation teams, or METs, have been removed from the hunt for weapons of mass destruction and been assigned instead to the laborious task of screening what officials call “non-WMD sites.” These are facilities with voluminous records that might prove enlightening on such issues as terrorism and prisoners of war. Because there are so many such sites, the teams are engaged in what one knowledgeable officer described as triage, trying to decide which ones are worth more thorough inspection. “The focus of main effort has changed,” said a military officer who works directly in the arms hunt. “Because of all the looting, coupled with [the fact that] they’re not coming up with anything on weapons, we’ve got to get these other sites secured. They can’t afford to have stuff walking off because the clues we have right now are not leading us anywhere.”

Now that U.S. forces control Baghdad, the nucleus of Iraq’s arms industry, some leading team members have expressed frustration about the shift of focus. As recently as last Wednesday, Defense Department officials were predicting that the war’s end would permit the teams to intensify their work and to reach high-priority weapons sites in significant numbers.

Wing Cmdr. Sebastian Kendall, a British Royal Air Force officer who leads the site exploitation planning center at Camp Doha, said “there has been no conscious decision to reduce the number of teams devoted to weapons of mass destruction.” But, he added, “it’s true to say that the environment is changing based on reality.”

“We are now in and around Baghdad and there is an imperative to contain the situation as much as possible,” he said. Ground forces have been ordered “to secure more sites, but also to exploit them quicker so we can release those forces.

“We will be methodically working our way through the list from top to bottom,” he said. And though many of the additional sites have no known relationship to concealed arms programs, he said, some of them “could be WMD-related because the intellectual knowledge may be there or the documents may be there.”

The mobile exploitation teams were staffed and equipped to provide more sophisticated analysis after others had identified and surveyed a weapons facility. They carry complex field equipment — including gas chromatographs, mass spectrometers and portable isotopic neutron spectroscopes — and are the only investigators in Iraq trained to safely transport samples of lethal material.

Army Lt. Col. Michael Slifka, an experienced arms inspector who directs night operations at the planning center, said “there’s not much just now for the METs to do” with those capabilities. Most of the weapons work at present, he said, is sifting unevaluated clues.

Tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines in Iraq have a copy of the pocket-sized “WMD Facility, Equipment and Munitions Identification Handbook.” The troops have made hundreds of excited reports. It falls to one of four “site survey teams,” two each assigned to the Army and Marines, to assess those tips. None, as yet, has led to a confirmed finding.

Even the estimated 50 facilities now being protected by U.S. forces represent a tiny fraction of the many thousands of government and Baath Party offices, state enterprises, prisons, barracks, camps and private homes of senior Iraqi officials — all of them types of places where Iraq has a history of concealing evidence of nonconventional arms. The ministry of industry and minerals, for example, oversaw more than 600 Iraqi state enterprises and 100,000 employees. U.N. arms inspectors once found more than a million pages of weapons documents on a chicken farm.

“There’s a common assumption that if you know they have chemical or biological weapons, then your intelligence should be good enough to know where they are,” said Feith. “But you may hear people talking, referring to specific substances or items, so you know from that that they have those substances or items” but may not know where the items are.

With site-specific intelligence less productive than hoped, Defense Department officials have concluded that the weapons hunt needs substantial reinforcement. That will come from the eventual deployment of more than 1,000 military and civilian analysts under the auspices of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The Iraq Survey Group, to be commanded by the DIA’s deputy director for intelligence operations, plans an immense catalog of Iraqi government records — an intelligence task rivaled in recent times only by the joint U.S.-German effort in the former East German archives in Berlin. Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, a career Russian specialist, will supervise the screening of Iraqi records.

Weapons of mass destruction will be a part, though not predominant share, of Dayton’s responsibilities. Even so, officials said, the number of arms investigators in Iraq should triple or quadruple by the time the DIA group is fully in place in about three months.

Kendall, the British officer who now directs planning for the arms hunt, said a search even on the present scale is without precedent.

“It’s very young,” he said. “It’s in its infancy.”

“Tomorrow will be one month into the campaign,” he added, “and we’ve got some way to go is what I’d say.”