N.Y. TIMES: U.S. Withdraws a Team of Weapons Hunters From Iraq, By Douglas Jehl

The Bush administration has quietly withdrawn from Iraq a 400-member military team whose job was to scour the country for military equipment, according to senior government officials. The step was described by some military officials as a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights and no longer expected to uncover the caches of chemical and biological weapons that the White House cited as a principal reason for going to war last March. A separate military team that specializes in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more that seven months at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of," said a survey group member.

Some of the government officials said the most important evidence from the weapons hunt might be contained in a vast collection of seized Iraqi documents being stored in a secret military warehouse in Qatar. Only a small fraction have been translated. The search for Iraqi weapons remains "the primary focus" of the survey group, a senior Defense Department official said. But he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts to join the team had recently been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search.

The cache of Iraqi documents cover subjects extending far beyond illicit weapons, according to senior military officials, and are so voluminous that, if stacked, they would rise 10 miles high, according to estimates by senior government officials. The warehouse in Qatar has become the center of work by the Defense Intelligence Agency to translate and analyze the documents, the officials said.