BAGHDAD, 9 December 2002 — Iraq challenged the United States and Britain yesterday to provide UN weapons inspectors with information they say they possess on prohibited Iraqi arms programs.
“We hope that our declaration will satisfy (the United States and Britain) as it is current, accurate as they have asked for and comprehensive, truthful,” Amir Al-Saadi, an adviser to President Saddam Hussein, told a news conference.
“If they have anything to the contrary, let them come up with it, give it to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), give it to UNMOVIC (UN weapons experts), they are here they could check it. Why play this game?,” he told journalists in Baghdad.
Iraq’s mandatory weapons declaration lists eight main nuclear sites and 20 supporting ones, Saadi said although he declined to reveal how close Baghdad was to a nuclear bomb.
“If I tell you we were close, it’s subjective, even promotional,” Saadi told a news conference. Iraq handed over a mammoth dossier on its nuclear, biological and chemical activities to UN weapons inspectors on Saturday which it says proves it has no prohibited weapons.
But US officials say Washington has substantial evidence, including some not made public, that Iraq has retained and accelerated banned weapons programs. Top US Sen. Joseph Lieberman said that Iraq’s weapons inventory delivered to UN arms inspectors was likely a “100-pound lie.”
In Baghdad, speaking to reporters Saadi gave an overview of what was in the various reports on chemical, biological and nuclear programs, reading chapter headings from the declaration but offering few details.
“Already it’s been described as a telephone book,” he said of the number of pages in the report. Citing the term “device development” in the nuclear program as an example of the technicalities, he explained “in the nuclear jargon, the device is the bomb.”
The mass of documents which Baghdad says will prove its innocence was shipped out yesterday for expert analysis while UN disarmament teams carried out fresh inspections of suspected sites in Iraq.
The plane flew with the documents to Cyprus, a base for the UN arms inspectors, where the pages were split into two batches. Some left with inspectors on a plane to Frankfurt on their way to the United Nations in New York. Other documents were flown to Austria, home of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA received its copy of Iraq’s weapons declaration at its headquarters in Vienna, where it will be analyzed immediately, a spokeswoman told AFP.
US President George W. Bush, who has made clear Iraq faces war if Washington judges Baghdad has deceived the world, promised that the Iraqi declaration would be studied carefully.
Meanwhile, UN nuclear experts yesterday drove to a geological studies center at Al-Sadun park in Baghdad.
Weapons specialists went to the major complex at Fallujah, 50 km northwest of the capital, which had specialized in chemical and biological arms.
A convoy of white UN vehicles carrying the teams from the IAEA and the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) rolled out of their headquarters in Baghdad around 8:30 a.m. (0530 GMT) heading for suspect sites.
Fallujah’s industrial chlorine and phenol production recently drew the renewed attention of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which suggested the level of output was too great for civilian uses.
A new batch of 25 inspectors — 21 from the IAEA and four from the UNMOVIC — arrived yesterday at Baghdad’s Saddam International Airport aboard a UN Hercules C-130 plane, an airport source said.
The arms experts’ spokesman, Hiro Ueki, accompanied the inspectors from their rear base in Cyprus, where he had flown earlier in the day on board the plane which took the Iraqi weapons declaration to the island en route to New York.
A German newspaper reported yesterday citing United Nations diplomats that in the weapons documentation report given to UN weapons inspectors on Saturday, Iraq admits to having exact plans for building nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. (The Independent)
