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AP News

US Forces Go Tunneling

By:ROBERT TANNER, Asociated Press Writer April 09, 2003

After years of rumors about Saddam's tunnels, U.S. forces begin to venture underground
NEW YORK - The mysterious tunnels of Iraq are rumored to stretch for scores of kilometers (miles), linking palaces, military strongholds and safe houses concealing leaders, treasure or weapons of mass destruction.

For U.S. troops strapping on night goggles and venturing underground, the tunnels are a new kind of battlefield in this war. No maps, no light and no handle - yet - on what they might find.

"For the type of regime we're dealing with, the tunnels represent an ideal spot to conceal weapons and serve as a hideout and in some cases an escape route," said Lt. Mark Kitchens, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is said to have built so many tunnels that just about anything could be underground - troops, weapons or even the Iraqi president himself.

"There were all sorts of tips and rumors, `dig under this and you will find that,'" said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission.

Buchanan said U.N. arms inspectors in 1998 found a combination of bunkers and tunnels below some of Saddam's palaces, but not the sophisticated network that had been speculated about.

"But that doesn't say that they don't exist," he said.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Tuesday that U.S. Marines have secured a city south of Baghdad - Al-Tuwaitha - where a nexus of underground labs, warehouses and bomb-proof offices extends beneath a site owned by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Agency.

It said 14 buildings betray high levels of radiation and nuclear residue. Weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency recently toured the city, "but did they go underground?" the paper quoted David Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq from 1992 to 1997 as saying.

On Tuesday, at the airport outside Baghdad, 150 soldiers of the 101st Airborne's 3rd Battalion, 3rd Brigade searched a 12-room complex inside a cave with white marble floors, 10-foot (3-meter) ceilings and fluorescent lighting. They found cigarette butts, tea bags and other signs of recent abandonment - but no Iraqis.

"We're going to have to try to figure out where they go," brigade commander Lt. Col. Lee Fetterman told The Associated Press at the airport. "There's no telling."

On Monday, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi colonel in one tunnel who was calling in artillery fire from his hideout.

Also at the airport, a Knight-Ridder news service report described 30 men from 1st Platoon Apache Company entering a tunnel through a "Staff only" doorway below the airport's baggage claim. They found a corridor six meters high and six meters wide (20 x 20 feet) that stretched for hundreds of meters (yards) in each direction - but no Iraqis.

Reports, some stretching back years, allege the existence of tunnels and bunkers built by Serbian, German or Chinese engineering firms, leading from palaces to secret hideaways and more.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld repeated those claims in December, arguing the futility of U.N. searches for weapons of mass destruction.

"They've got enormous miles and miles and miles of underground tunneling," Rumsfeld said. "I don't know how inspectors on the surface of the Earth can even know what's going on in the underground facilities."

Hussein al-Shahristani, a scientist who was imprisoned by Saddam and fled during the 1991 Gulf War, told CBS' "60 Minutes" in February that plans originally called for a subway beneath Baghdad.

Saddam "got all the drawings; he told his military, `Go ahead and do them but not for a metro, for our weapons of mass destruction. We can hide them, move them around,'" al-Shahristani said. "We believe now it is more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) of very complex network, multilayer tunnels."

But al-Shahristani never saw the tunnels himself, he said.

Few have, said Patrick Garrett of Globalsecurity.org, a military affairs think tank. "There is tons of conjecture on this subject right now," he said, but "there's been no official confirmation or official imagery."

After encountering the caves used by al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the rumors of tunnels here, the U.S. military took steps to ready their troops.

A site with kilometers (miles) of old mining caves in the Mojave Desert in Southern California was turned into a Tunnel Warfare Center in 2001, training U.S. troops in the challenges posed underground.

©Indiana Printing & Publishing Co. 2003

The mysterious tunnels of Iraq are rumored to stretch for scores of kilometers (miles),...

A little off the topic, but notice how they think that they have to tell us that kilometers are a measurement akin to miles, but they don't tell us what a "score" is.

It is amazing that AP buries this info in a middle of an article, talking about other things. And the title "US Forces go tunneling" doesn't even begin to give the impression of the magnitude of the revelations.

Do you get the feeling that maybe the main media is deliberately trying to bury this (pardon the pun), precisely because it vindicates completely our actions and answers the question "Why Iraq, why NOW?" -- because any later, it would be too late.

Is the media as deluded as the Iraqi info minister, and think that if they don't report it, this won't come out?

I think Rumsfeld is waiting for more info and so on, but I am sure he will mention it at some point.

What IS the matter with the media? They manage to report and hype insignificant things, and ignore a story as big as this.