WASHINGTON (AP) - American forces in Iraq are doing tests on a trailer that matches the description of a mobile biological weapons lab given by various sources including defectors, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
It was the first time the Defense Department has announced it might have evidence of the sort of prohibited unconventional weapons program that it said justified forcibly disarming Saddam Hussein.
``On the smoking gun, I don't know,'' Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone said, when asked whether this was a breakthrough in the continuing coalition search for weapons of mass destruction.
Cambone said that what the U.S. military has in its possession is the kind of mobile laboratory that Secretary of State Colin Powell described in an unsuccessful attempt to get U.N. Security Council approval for the war.
``They have not found another plausible use for it,'' Cambone said.
The information Powell gave the U.N., Cambone said, ``was based on information from a number of sources and it confirms what the source said.''
Cambone said that experts had done initial tests on a trailer taken into custody April 19 at a Kurdish checkpoint in northern Iraq but said more substantial testing is required.
Cambone said the surface of it was washed with a caustic material and it likely would have to be dismantled before testing can be done on hard-to-reach surfaces.
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