Ex-Officer Spurned on WMD Claim

This is just getting curiouser by the day. First the Sada revelations, then the emergence of secrect Sadaam tapes presently being evaluated by a congressional intelligence committee and now this. What the motivation by the government for covering up evidence of WMD in Iraq or a transfer of said to Syria is a mystery to me. Ideas?

A former special investigator for the Pentagon during the Iraq war said he
found four sealed underground bunkers in southern Iraq that he is sure contain
stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But when he asked American weapons
inspectors to check out the sites, he was rebuffed.

David Gaubatz, a former member of the Air Force's Office of Special
Investigations, was assigned to the Talill Air Base in Nasiriyah at the launch
of Operation Iraqi Freedom. His job was to pick up any intelligence on the
whereabouts of senior Baathists and weapons of mass destruction and then send
the information to the American weapons inspectors gathering in Baghdad that
would later become the Iraq Survey Group. For his intelligence work he received
accolades and meritorious service medals in 2003 and prior years. Before the war
he helped uncover a spy in the Saudi military. He also assisted with the rescue
and repatriation to America of the family of Mohammed Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer
who helped save Private Jessica Lynch.

Between March and July 2003, Mr. Gaubatz was taken by these sources to four
locations - three in and around Nasiriyah and one near the port of Umm Qasr,
where he was shown underground concrete bunkers with the tunnels leading to them
deliberately flooded. In each case, he was told the facilities contained stocks
of biological and chemical weapons, along with missiles whose range exceeded
that mandated under U.N. sanctions. But because the facilities were sealed off
with concrete walls, in some cases up to 5 feet thick, he did not get inside. He
filed reports with photographs, exact grid coordinates, and testimony from
multiple sources. And then he waited for the Iraq Survey Group to come to the
sites. But in all but one case, they never arrived.

The new information from the former investigator could also end up helping
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which recently reopened
the question of what happened to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Like
many current and former American and Israeli officials, the chairman of the
House intelligence committee, Peter Hoekstra, says is not convinced Saddam
either destroyed or never had the stockpiles of illicit weapons he was said to
be concealing between 1991 and 2003.