WASHINGTON — A reinvigorated search for Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction is making "solid progress," U.S. officials said Thursday, even though no proof has been found in the four months since American troops invaded Iraq.
Over the last six weeks, the officials said, U.S. forces have visited scores of newly identified sites, interviewed or interrogated Iraqi scientists and officials, and recovered hundreds of thousands of documents, computer discs and other potentially useful records.
The officials did not say if the evidence dates to Iraq's previously documented weapons programs from the 1980s and early 1990s, or if it supports White House claims that Hussein's regime secretly produced vast new stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons before the war this spring.
"We are making solid progress," David Kay, a former U.N. weapons inspector who now works as a CIA advisor in Iraq, told reporters after a three-hour, closed-door briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
It was the first report on the work of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which in June replaced a weapons-hunting operation that was beset by poor intelligence, communication difficulties, inadequate transport and security, competing commands and other problems.
"It is going to take time," Kay said. "This was a program that over 25 years spent billions of dollars, [had] 10,000 people, was actively shielded by a security and deception plan. So it is not something that is easy to unwrap. But we are in the process."
A senior member of the team who recently returned from Iraq was less optimistic, however. He said the group "started from scratch" six weeks ago and is largely repeating research and other work that others, including United Nations inspectors, already have done.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the team recently was ordered to search more than 100 sites from a list that the Pentagon had compiled before the war.
"It didn't make any sense," he said. "Everything had been looted."
Kay, however, said the Iraq Survey Group is not using "a sterile list drawn up before the war.
"We are being led to these sites by Iraqis and documentation from the Saddam Hussein regime."
Kay said the documents and collaboration of Iraqis involved in the weapons infrastructure are "leading us to new discoveries every day that further help us understand the full extent and nature of Saddam's program."
