Meekin, a lanky man with a bone-crushing handshake, said the Iraq Survey Group has no access to the million-page Iraqi weapons database compiled by U.N. inspectors. He said the group does have Baghdad's weapons declarations to the U.N. Security Council as well as "all the documents on the U.N. Web site."
Even so, search team leaders said they have little information about what sites U.N. inspectors visited or what they found.
Army Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, a wiry former Green Beret who heads SST-5, recently found 16 barrels of what he believes may be uranium oxide stored at a fertilizer factory at Al Qaim near the Syrian border in western Iraq. He still wonders why U.N. nuclear inspectors who visited the site scores of times left the drums behind.
"We didn't have their file," Harrington said. "Would it have helped? Absolutely."
Confusing matters further, military and intelligence officials in charge of the hunt have renamed some Iraqi sites that were intensely investigated by U.N. inspectors.
For example, an exploitation team was sent last week to "Samarra" to check a report of material contaminated by mustard gas, a blister agent.
They discovered two bunkers sealed long ago by U.N. inspectors at the Muthana State Establishment, which in the 1980s was the heart of Iraq's chemical weapons program. U.S. Army Rangers had broken into one of the U.N. bunkers and reported the suspect material inside.
Few here deny the problems, and most say they still believe they ultimately will find evidence of proscribed weapons, even if it's only leftovers from Hussein's 1980s programs.
All proudly cite discoveries of stockpiles of conventional munitions, short-range missiles, and other weapons that Iraq was permitted to possess under U.N. resolutions. They say the new policy -- to rely more on local tips than on outdated search lists -- already is paying off.
Last month, for example, an Iraqi farmer pointed Hann's SST-6 team to a rock quarry where thousands of antiaircraft, air-to-ground and other missiles and bombs have been stashed away since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Looters had ripped open the packing crates to steal the wood, and hundreds of missiles lay strewn in the dirt.
"My jaw dropped," Hann said.
These days, Hann does what he can to keep his 12-member site team sharp. But the pickings are slim.
On Monday, a planned visit to the nearby firing range was cut short because of a scheduling glitch. A training mission Tuesday to three Republican Guard bunkers, supposedly filled with live munitions, was aborted when the team found that bombing had left the bunkers too dangerous to enter.
On Wednesday, the team donned flak vests and helmets to drive Humvees into Baghdad to buy a fan. On Thursday, they mounted up again to drive to the airport PX to buy Cokes.
"I hate to say it, but there are just days when we don't do anything," Hann said.
