All the buildings were hit by looters, and most have no air conditioning or running water. Soldiers have furnished their oven-like accommodations with glittering chandeliers, wingback chairs, gilt-edged tables and pieces of Saddam-kitsch sculpture scavenged from the complex's five major palaces.
Some troops live in what they believe was a brothel. Now called the Fishbowl, it features marble fish cascading along the staircase, a fireplace in the gaping mouth of a giant carved carp, and blue-green glass in the roof that casts an aquarium-like glow on those below. Others have taken up residence in what they call Bedrock, a Flintstones-like playground of tiny cave condos carved into fake cliffs and boulders.
By all accounts, the Pentagon's first weapons-hunting plan was based on the assumption that U.S. forces battling to Baghdad would find a vast array of banned weapons, components and production facilities.
"Frankly, we expected to find large warehouses full of chemical or biological weapons, or delivery systems," said Army Col. John Connell, who heads the sensitive site teams. "At this point, we're getting fairly sure we're not going to find a full-up production facility. We're going to find little pieces."
During the war, four teams trained by the CIA followed combat troops to assess any weapons caches found. If they detected lethal chemicals or germs, they were to call in separate "mobile exploitation teams" to collect samples and conduct field tests. If they confirmed a find, they could call a third set of teams to disable or eliminate the weapons.
No illicit arms were found. And shortages of Arabic translators and interrogators, as well as radios, vehicles and helicopters, meant teams were largely unable to investigate on their own.
The teams were reorganized, retrained and restaffed with intelligence officers, mostly from the Utah National Guard, after major combat ended in mid-April. These new SSTs spent the next six weeks visiting about 300 sites from the prewar target list.
United Nations weapons inspectors -- relying in part on intelligence handed over by the CIA -- already had searched most of the sites without result shortly before the war, senior officials here said.
"We haven't closed anything, but we're almost at the point now of putting a red line through the target list," said Brig. Gen. Steve Meekin, the top-ranking Australian in the Iraq Survey Group. "Most have been comprehensively looted or bombed, and there's absolutely nothing there now anyway."
