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Washington Post staff writer Barton Gellman, who reported from Iraq on the hunt for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, was online Friday, June 13, at 2 p.m. ET to discuss the search for WMD and the ongoing debate over the use of intelligence.

Did Saddam Hussein have weapons of mass destruction? How far along was Iraq in developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons? Where is the evidence of such programs and how was intelligence used before the war?

In today's Washington Post, Gellman reports that "a covert Army Special Forces unit, operating in Iraq since before the war began, has played a dominant but ultimately unsuccessful role in the Bush administration's stymied hunt for weapons of mass destruction, according to military and intelligence sources in Baghdad and Washington."

The transcript follows.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

washingtonpost.com: Barton Gellman will be online shortly.

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College Park, MD: I take you are an 'inbedded' reporter? How sensitive is the WMD issue for your handlers there?

If you can answer this question, please do. What is the feeling/morale among the WMD searchers now? Are they beginning to smell a rat, and have they accepted that there are no weapons to be found yet?

Barton Gellman: sorry I'm late....

I wasn't exactly embedded or "unilateral". I persuaded the military to let me live with a search team for a week, and visit a bit longer, without any special written agreement or status.

The search teams are deeply frustrated and baffled about why they haven't found anything, but they do not -- any of them that I found -- suspect that they were sent in bad faith.

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washingtonpost.com: Barton Gellman, thank you for joining us online today. From your reporting, what did U.S. intelligence say about Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities before the war? What exactly are U.S. teams searching for in Iraq?

Barton Gellman: We still have a lot to learn about what U.S. intelligence knew about the weapons before the war. What the Bush administration said is public record: there were intact weapons, hundreds of tons of bulk chemical warfare agents, thousands of liters of bulk liquid anthrax, nuclear enrichment equipment and Scud missiles. They've yet to be found.

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Alexandria, VA: The United States went to war, in part, because UN weapons inspectors were not given unfettered access to various sites. Why didn't the US let the UN inspectors lead the search for WMD, as opposed to our own inspectors? Wouldn't that have more credibility?

Barton Gellman: The Bush administration came to believe that Unmovic (searching for biological, chemical and missile programs) and especially the International Atomic Energy Agency (what it sounds like)were determined to oppose U.S. policy and invested in the view that there was not much WMD left. Some administration folks recognize the need for independent surveys for credibility, but they intend to accomplish that -- if they find anything -- by maintaining strict chain of custody records and letting independent labs in Europe (in Finland or Austria, for instance) confirm the U.S. lab results. I tend to doubt that U.S. chain of custody records will be accepted by international skeptics -- I mean fence sitters who could be persuaded of a WMD find -- as sufficient.

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Charlottesville, Virginia: Is there a point past which the effort will be deemed a failure? Or would it be possible for WMD to exist without ever being found?

Barton Gellman: Deemed by whom? A good fraction of the commentariat, especially in Europe, started deeming weeks ago. I'm quite sure the US government never will. ON Wednesday, a high ranking national security official told me the people who say there are no WMD are going to be embarrassed in "weeks or months" when the evidence is unveiled. I'm from Missouri on that one. (For folks who don't know: the "Show Me" state.)

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los angeles: If Saddam had WMD, why didn't he use them during the war? Wouldn't that be the "best" time -- to save his power?
I'm interested in what your thoughts are on that, as well as the administration's theory (if anyone has asked them that).

Barton Gellman: A fascinating variant of this question is: what happened to the U.S. intel reports as the war began that Saddam had given "release authority" for chemical weapons to his Republican Guard commanders? I can tell you that the generals running the U.S. war really believed that and behaved accordingly. But if there was release authority, there must have been something to release -- actual assembled weapons in places where they could be used on short notice. That has now been I think decisively disproved.

If there were weapons that could have been available, but were not staged for use, the possible explanations are many, and various government analysts have used them all.

1. Saddam's strategy was rope-a-dope, to tie down U.S. forces until international pressure forced a stop to the war. That would have been made hopeless by proving the U.S. claim that he had WMD and was prepared to use them.

2. He believed U.S. threats (ambiguous but quite menacing) about the consequences of such use.

3. His subordinates believed those threats and disobeyed or discouraged such orders.

4. The U.S./UK advance was so fast that Iraqis had no chance to react with WMD -- the shock of hte attack got "inside their decision cycle," as military planners like to say. This no longer seems plausible, for reasons stated above.

5. Saddam preferred to ride out the war, even what he supposed might be his temporary dislodging from power, and conceal the weapons for later.

I expect I'm forgetting one or two.

My own tendency now is to think Iraq was maintaining the means of reconstituting WMD but not bulk agents or weapons themselves. But the thing I like about an empirical job is my predictions and guesses are meaningless, and often wrong. Let's keep working on finding out.

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Independence,MO: Mr. Gellman, I was interested to read your report on the covert Army Special Forces unit and the hunt for WMD's. It seems to me that this task force was in optimum position to get their hands on anything that was potentially going to be used by Iraq in defense of a U.S. strike. Can you tell me how long before the strike they were on the ground in Iraq? I'm also curious as to all the intellegence information that the President and others in the administration kept refering to. Was it just bad information?

It seems if we had people who could pinpoint buildings that certain people were in and identify them as targets and be so precise as to which corner of a building to pinpoint a missile, how could we lose tract of something intellegence is supposed to have identified and located?

Barton Gellman: Well, it's true to say, as the government does say, that you can have strong evidence something exists without knowing where. (Saddam Hussein comes to mind.)

It's also less clear than we thought before that U.S. intelligence succeeded in pinpointing where people were. Serious doubts have been cast on their earlier view that they bombed the bunker(s) Saddam was in, and that they killed his cousin, "Chemical Ali."

I spent some time in one of the bunkers, by the way, which was fascinating.

Task Force 20, the subject of today's story, was indeed in the best position to act on intel. They started doing so at least 24 hours before the first bombs fell.

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BALT. MD.: What are the soldiers saying about wmd?

Barton Gellman: The soldiers are saying they expected to find big stocks, they counted on U.S. intel to bring them there, and they're now wasting their time on lists of "target sites" that are clearly useless. Many of the sites were looted and burned, so if they ever had WMD the evidence is gone. Many others were clearly bad tips. I watched Site Survey Team 3 break down doors to find chambers of vacuum cleaners, fabric rolls, marble slabs. They confiscated suspicious documents that turned out to be a high school biology project. Etc.

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washingtonpost.com: Odyssey of Frustration -- In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacumm Cleaners The Washington Post, May 18, 2003

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Washington, DC: Why has the press taken so long to investigate concerns as to whether Iraq actually had WMD? Do you think the press has a responsibility to investigate such conerns, and has the press sufficiently fulfilled its responsibility to the American public?

Barton Gellman: I don't much like broad questions on "the press," because I think there's way too much variation in what we do and how. We tried hard to probe the evidence for the administration's claims before the war, and if you go back to that coverage (say, of Powell's Feb. 5 U.N. presentation) you'll find a tone of some skepticism because the evidence on display did not match the strength of the conclusions. But we had to acknowledge the possibility that U.S. intel knew a lot that it could not say because of the need to protect sources. (After all, we work that way too.) It's natural that more data has come out since the war because the weapons haven't been found and the people who dissented or doubted the intel before the war are more willing to say so.

On the progress of the hunt, there was a lot of early TV excitement about preliminary "findings" of weapons. You didn't see that tone at all in this newspaper, since we were well aware ofthe limitations of the field tests. When I was finally given access to the hunters themselves, I wrote quite clearly, even humorously I think, about their lack of progress. You can find my coverage at www.washingtonpost.com/bartongellman, and I'll leave the judgment in the hands of readers.

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New Brunswick, New Jersey: How many people are there searching for the WMD? Are they all US troops?

Barton Gellman: There were about 900 people in the original 75th Exploitation Task Force, but as in combat units a lot of those people are logistics and headquarters staff. There were eight mobile search teams (some called survey teams, others exploitation teams) and a laboratory and a separate contingent from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency -- in all, I'd estimate 200 actual search personnel.

Turns out there was a covert team as well, Task Force 20, which had something like 500 people in it but again many fewer actual "subject matter experts".

Great majority of all these are Americans, but some Brits.

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Washington, D.C.: Shortly after the war ended, Judith Miller from the NY Times reported a "find" of some evidence of stashed chemical weapon components in Iraq. But I never saw anything again in reference to this story, confirmation or refutation. Do you have any further information?

Barton Gellman: My reporting said simply that, according to experts inside and outside government, the significance of this scientist's story (her piece ran April 21, I think) "could not be assessed" without a great deal more information and validation. If it had been validated, we would have heard about it by now, and I have put some energy into my reporting on that question.

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Ithaca, Ithaca: If weapons are found, under intence pressure to find them, how would we verify the authenticity (no suggestion intended)?

Barton Gellman: It's going to be a tough sell for the Bush administration if it collects samples, takes them somewhere, analyzes and assesses them, and then some time later unveils them. Most Americans, polls show, already believe Iraq had WMD.

Doubters fall into more than one camp. Some, I suspect, could never be persuaded. They might also believe the inevitable conspiracy theories, that the White House arranged to plant evidence. I don't think such a thing would be attempted, among other reasons because they could never get away with it -- there are too many independent experts who could recognize a plant, and it's too hard to keep an explosive secret like that.

Another camp of doubters, I think, is persuadable. But it will take a genuine show of independent confirmation to persuade them.

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Washington, DC: It seems that soldiers are not well suited to conduct this search. They are not technical experts or scientists, so they cannot be expected to know if a piece of machinery or a componenet is significant or not. By the same token, they do not have the technical expertise to interview scientists and judge the credibiltiy of their stories. How do they feel about being given a task they can't do, which is not their fault?

Barton Gellman: Untrained soldiers didn't do the job. I humbly recommend a look at my earlier stories. The people who led the search know a lot about BW CW missiles and nukes. They could have recognized them had they found them.

It's true, though, that the openly operating search teams did not have training in interviews (interrogation, if you want to put it that way, or humint); did not have Arabic; and often -- bafflingly -- had not been supplied with basic U.S. intelligence about the sites they were inspecting.

I went to the Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility in Tuweitha with a team of genuine nuclear experts. But they were not experts on Iraq's nuclear history, and they knew very little about the site. The leader found a bunch of radioactive drums and didn't expect them there. I took my pocket GPS, obtained the lat/long coordinates, called an inspector with long experience at the site, told him what I was seeing and the coordinates, and he said: That's the permanent nuclear waste storage facility, under IAEA monitoring, Building 55. It's not the team leader's fault he didn't know that, but it's somebody's fault.

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Chicago, Il: 500 tons of chemical warfare agents is about a million pounds. I was told that depending on the density, it would take somewhere between 300 and 7,700 semitrailer trucks to haul this anywhere. How likely did the intelligence in Iraq think the possibility this was hauled away to a hiding location out of Iraq?

Barton Gellman: There may be intel that says some WMD related stuff was sent out of Iraq, but it's absurd to suggest that great quantities could have been moved across known border chokepoints in a compressed period of time during which U.S. intel assets were so intensively focused on Iraq.

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washingtonpost.com: Barton Gellman's stories and Washington Post coverage of the hunt for WMD can be found on washingtonpost.com's special report.

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Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Hi Mr Gellman,

I' m from Montreal, Canada (french
speaking, sorry for my bad english). From
outside USA, we see that foreign
journalist, especially from Europe, talk
louder and much more about the
possibility of lying speeches of USA
officials about chemical weapons in
IRAQ. Is it right?

Barton Gellman: Yes, the European press is much louder on this subject. I respectfully suggest that what those folks are writing is commentary, not reporting. We know that the weapons have not been found, but not for sure that they never will be; that the U.S. government made categorical allegations but not whether they were based on ordinary error, subjective analysis that found what the analysts expected or hoped to find, deliberate suppression of dissent, spin, or outright lying. Those are questions of fact, and they require evidence. That's just what serious reporters are looking for, and anyone who claims to have decisive evidence is simply wrong. It has not been produced.

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crofton, MD: Is it purely politics that is making Bush refuse to admit he was quite possibly wrong- or that his information was wrong?

Barton Gellman: Politics is usually a big part of any government's behavior, but see also: my last answer.

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Boston, MA: There is a lot of talk now about whether Iraq really has or had WMD. There were warning flags even before the war. Why didn't anyone raise the issue before? Or was it that anyone who did got labelled unpatriotic?

Barton Gellman: The question was raised plenty, in stories about the US/French/German/Russian/Chinese disputes, and in substantive stories about the evidence. They're louder now -- and the critics are ascendant -- because (1) nothing has been found and (2) more intel is leaking out from people in government who were quiet dissenters before the war. The dissenters may or may not have been right about the quality of the evidence. That's what I'd like to know, with facts to back up the assertion.

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scarsdale,ny: I could understand the frustation of the search teams you write about. Does it affect the way you tell their story? Do these persons rationalize their failure with you or is the media an enemy to them?

Barton Gellman: If you look at the stories, particularly the Odyssey story linked above, you'll see that they spoke quite openly with me after we'd spent time together -- I gained their confidence, I suppose, and I saw what they saw, and I lived in their not so fabulous conditions. They surely included skeptics about "the media" but the way we experience real life is one newspaper, one story, one reporter at a time, and we form judgments on what we can trust. Believe me I do it too. There are reporters and journalistic companies whose work I don't respect and tend to doubt, and for any claim -- from a bar room story to a published piece -- I look to my judgement guided by experience, and the internal evidence in the story, to guide me in what to believe.

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maryland: Since it is unlikely the government will ever admit that they have failed to find WMD (provided they continue to fail) it seems clear that someone will have to decide the search is over. Who will that be and when will that happen?

Barton Gellman: Well, one phase is over. The focus on "sites" has failed, and the 75th XTF (see above) is going home. A new group, the Iraq Survey Group, is coming in with a focus on files and personnel -- they'll try to assemble the picture from interviews and documents. We'll watch carefully what they find, and what their troops conclude, as time goes on. But anyone can decide when the reasonable prospects have passed, and a lot of people have.

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Madison, WI: Is there any concern in the government that Hussein gave WMDs to terrorist organizations at the start of the war? (if he knew he would lose power anyway, why not get in a last shot?)

Barton Gellman: Yes. Or, more broadly, that the weapons have scattered somewhere -- freelancers, Baathists, third parties, terrorists, other states. In fact that risk is entailed in what the US government says: that the weapons exist, that the search teams haven't found them, and that the previous regime's control mechanisms are largely gone. Under that analysis *someone*, under no broad control, has the weapons.

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Atlanta, Georgia: Since we have alot of the Iraqi scientists that allegedly ran the WMD programs-have they provided any evidence of these illicit weapons?

Barton Gellman: Not as many scientists as the government would like, and they haven't provided nearly enough to reach the ultimate objective -- present whereabouts of the weapons themselves. If the weapons really are out there, consider: a scientist may know what s/he designed, but may not know where it was made, or how much, or where it was taken, or by whom, and what happened after that and after that.... If the weapons exist, it will take a very long patient and maybe lucky process to find htem.

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Toronto, Canada: 2 questions:

1. Is the Bush administration holding back dissemination of any significant knowledge/findings in their search as trump cards?

2. How much successful cooperation was there between Syria and the Iraqi Baathist regime in transporting and hiding weapons in Syria/Lebanon and what are the facts on the ground there?

Barton Gellman: Some Bush appointees say there is a lot they're holding back because they want to be sure they verify and bulletproof the evidence. We'll see.

We simply don't know much about Baghdad-Damascus transfers. We know that regime leaders (for instance, Saddam's son in law) and scientists fled to Syria, but if there's evidencefor weapons transfer I don't know about it.

Let me mention, by the way, that my email address is gellmanb@washpost.com and I'm always eager to learn from people who know things.

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Patrick Kiger, Takoma Park, MD:
I think Bush's spin doctors have managed to define the WMD controversy in a way that's misleading. They keep focusing on deriding critics who question whether the WMDs actually existed.

In doing so, they're artfully evading the real issue. The supposed justification for this war was that we needed to find and destroy Saddam's alleged WMD arsenal, in order to prevent those weapons from getting into the hands of terrorists who might use them to attack the United States.

In that sense, the war so far is a complete strategic fiasco. Assuming that these weapons did in fact exist, as Bush continues to proclaim as an article of faith, we now have no clue at all where they are, and who might have control of them. Bush, Rumsfeld etal. blundered by not even making sure that that our military quickly secured Iraq's nuclear research facilities, with the result that they were thoroughly looted. It strikes me that we're actually in a far more unsafe position now than we were prior to the war. I'd like to read your comment on this.

Barton Gellman: I mentioned the near certainty that, if the weapons exist, they've been scattered. That's certainly a worse thing than having them under central control. The administration response is that there was less of it to scatter, and less dangerous stuff (i.e. no nuclear weapons -- yet), than there would have been had Iraq's weapons development continued.

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Harlingen, Texas:
Since the quantities of chemical and biological weapons, not to mention associated munitions, production facilities, storage facilities etc. that the Administration says existed are quite large -- a question or three:

Is there historical precendent for a defeated state having being able to hide such amounts of material from an occupying power for a couple of months? Not just all of the material, but any least trace of it? When the occupying power was expending considerable effort looking for that specific material?

Barton Gellman: Well, I don't know any precedent, but I could be missing something. I find entirely implausible that the weapons could have been sent in bulk out of the country, or destroyed without a trace. But Saddam's government was a very good hider, in all seriousness, and he had thousands of people for many years devoted to hiding weapons. It's certainly true that not one of Iraq's previous "full, final and complete disclosures" under UNSCOM from '91-99 survived scrutiny. Iraq was a serial liar about its programs for the entire known history of inspections, and Unmovic this year had no chance to pass its own judgement. So I would have to say it's still possible that there are stocks of WMD still hidden.

Folks, I've gone overtime because there are so many questions, but I really have to stop now. Sorry I couldn't get to everyone.

Goodbye.

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washingtonpost.com: Thank you Bart Gellman for joining us online today. For more on the search for weapons of mass destruction, read Gellman's reports on washingtonpost.com.

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