The White House on Thursday played down the withdrawal from Iraq of a 400-member military team specializing in the disposal of weapons of mass destruction.

Scott McClellan, spokesman for President Bush, said that even though the disposal team was leaving, the group focused on hunting weapons was remaining in Iraq.

"The Iraq Survey Group continues to do its work," McClellan told reporters aboard Air Force One. Bush was en route to Tennessee for an event on school reform and a fund-raiser.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the departure of the team was "a sign that the administration might have lowered its sights" and viewed it as less likely that chemical and biological weapons would be discovered.

The administration had cited the threat of illicit weapons (WMD's) as a principle reason for launching war on Iraq in March of last year.

McClellan said, "We already know from (the Iraq Survey Group's) interim report that Saddam Hussein's regime was in serious violation" of United Nations disarmament demands.

In a potential setback to the so far fruitless hunt for banned weapons, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, told administration officials last month he was considering leaving his job.

A report due to have been released yesterday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has concluded that it was unlikely that Iraq could have destroyed, hidden or sent out of the country the hundreds of tonnes of chemical and biological weapons and related production facilities that US officials claimed were present "without the United States detecting some sign of this activity".

In an interim report in October, Mr Kay acknowledged that his team had failed to find illicit weapons or active weapons programs in Iraq, but said it had discovered evidence that the ousted Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, planned to develop the weapons and might have retained the capacity to do so.

Mr Kay has not said when he intends to release his next report - that remains a subject of debate within the Bush Administration, officials said.

A separate military team that specialises in disposing of chemical and biological weapons remains part of the 1400-member Iraq Survey Group, which has been searching Iraq for more than seven months.

But that team is "still waiting for something to dispose of", a survey group member said.

Some US 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.

Senior intelligence officials acknowledged in recent days the weapons hunters still had not found weapons, but they said the search must continue to ensure that no hidden Iraqi weapons surfaced in a future attack.

"We worry about what may have happened to those weapons," said Stuart Cohen, vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

"Theories abound as to what may have happened."

However, he acknowledged that most of the dozens of new linguists and intelligence analysts who joined the team recently had been given assignments related to combating the Iraqi insurgency rather than to the weapons search. David Kay, head of the survey group, made it known last month that he might leave his post.

The 400-member team withdrawn from Iraq, known as the Joint Captured Materiel Exploitation Group, was primarily composed of technical experts and was headed by an Australian brigadier, Defence Department officials said.

Its work included searching weapons depots and other sites for missile launchers that might have been used with illicit weapons. It was withdrawn "because its work was essentially done", an official said. "They picked up everything that was worth picking up."

(Reuters)