US Task Force Fails to Pinpoint Illegal Weapons: Paper

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US Task Force Fails to Pinpoint Illegal Weapons: Paper

A covert US Special Forces unit, code-named Task Force 20, has failed to fulfill the mission of hunting for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, The Washington Post reported Friday.

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A covert US Special Forces unit, code-named Task Force 20, has failed to fulfill the mission of hunting for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Task Force 20, whose existence and mission are classified, is drawn from the elite US Army special mission units known as Delta Force, with a primary assignment to find "smoking gun" that Saddam Hussein possessed the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The Task Force unit, operating in Iraq since before the war began in March, has played a dominant but ultimately unsuccessful role in the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction, according to military and intelligence sources in Baghdad and Washington.

The principal assignment of the unit is to "seize, destroy, render safe, capture, or recover weapons of mass destruction," the Post quoted a Special Operations mission statement as saying. However, the unit has come no close to the Bush administration's declared objective.

The unit sent a stream of initially promising reports to a limited circle of planners and policy-makers in Washington pointing to the possibility of weapons finds, the Post said, adding that the reports helped feed the optimism expressed by President George W. Bush and his senior national security advisers that proscribed weapons would be found.

Sources with first-hand knowledge of its mission and personnel and other with access to its reports said the team has found no working nonconventional munitions, long-range missiles or missile part, bulk stores of chemical or biological warfare agents or enrichment technology for the core of a nuclear weapons, the paper said.

So far, the US Defense Department has not made public the preliminary findings of the unit.

The United States has claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction which constituted a threat to its national security, a primary reason that the Bush administration has justified its war against Iraq, part of the "axis of evil."

However, two months after the end of major fighting in Iraq, no hard evidence has been found to support its charges that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the US national security, the U.S. News and World Report said in its June 9 edition.

In Washington, the Bush administration has been facing mounting criticism for the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and debates are heating up on whether the issue was exaggerated by the administration.

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