US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that intelligence information indicated Iraqi troops may use chemical weapons against US-led invasion forces as they close in on Baghdad, although he did not know how accurate the information was.
During a Pentagon briefing, Rumsfeld said he received information "that suggests that the closer that coalition forces get to Baghdad and Tikrit, the greater the likelihood [of the use of chemical weapons] and that some command and control arrangements have been put in place."
But he referred to the data as "intelligence scraps" and "chatter in the system," and said, "Who knows how accurate they are?"
He did not give details on how this intelligence information was gathered or who provided it.
Baghdad denies that it has chemical weapons or other wea-pons of mass destruction.
Iraq used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurdish civilians and against Iranian forces on the battlefield in the 1980s.
US officials have declined to say how US forces would retaliate if the Iraqis used poison gas or any other weapon of mass destruction.
Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said US Central Command chief General Tommy Franks has formulated some kind of plan to retaliate.
"The one thing we're not going to do is to say what they are right now because we haven't seen use of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] so far as we know at this point," Myers said.
Rumsfeld also did not say how close to Baghdad, the Iraqi capital, or Tikrit, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's ancestral hometown, US forces would have to come to trigger chemical weapons use by the Iraqis, according to the intelligence data.
US forces were already approaching the Iraqi capital from the south on Tuesday.
US defense and intelligence officials say Iraq possesses a hidden stockpile of chemical and biological agents and has numerous ways to deliver them to their target, including artillery shells, rockets and small planes with spray tanks.
Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said last month that the US government believes Iraq would use chemical or biological weapons when Saddam "makes the decision that the regime is in jeopardy."
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