-Caveat Lector- http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=20959
US begins scrutiny of Iraq dossier By Kim Sengupta UNITED NATIONS/BAGHDAD, 10 December 2002 — Washington has won full access to the complete Iraqi arms dossier, in an embarrassing blow to the United Nations chief inspector, Hans Blix, who had said it would be edited on security grounds before being passed to UN member countries. In what will be seen as another example of the United States getting its way in an increasingly acrimonious relationship with the UN mission, the Security Council carried out its third change of rules in four days to give the five permanent council members an unedited version of the Baghdad report. Later, US officials began poring over the arms dossier, diplomats said. A quiet deal was struck to override a Friday ruling of the full 15-member council, which had feared technical secrets on the manufacture of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons might pass into the wrong hands if the full document was circulated. After weekend discussions involving UN weapons experts and diplomats of the United States and the four other permanent members of the council — Britain, France, Russia and China, all nuclear powers already — it was agreed to let the five have all 12,000 pages, diplomats said. “It’s already in Washington,” a Bush Administration official said. US experts are expected to search for discrepancies between the disclosures made by Iraq in the 12,000-page dossier and what US intelligence believes it knows about continuing Iraqi efforts to develop banned weapons. UN experts in New York and Vienna also began studying Iraq’s arms dossier yesterday to judge whether it says enough to satisfy demands for disarmament as IAEA Director General Mohamed El-Baradei said in Tokyo the arms inspection process could take up to a year. In Doha, US forces kicked off yesterday a major military command exercise in the Gulf, turning up the heat on Iraq. About 1,000 US and British battle staff led by Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of US forces in the Gulf, launched the “Internal Look” computerized war games from Qatar’s As-Sayliyah army base south of Doha, officials said. Hours after Baghdad’s arms declaration arrived at the United Nations headquarters in New York, UN inspectors resumed their searches of suspect sites in Iraq, returning to a complex that was at the heart of previous efforts to make a nuclear bomb. Washington stressed it would wait to see what was in the 12,000-page document flown from Baghdad on Sunday. But US officials say they have their own evidence of continuing Iraqi nuclear, biological or chemical programs and insist Washington will take military action if necessary to rid Iraq of them. In Vienna, the IAEA said yesterday it was not surprised by hints from an Iraqi official on Sunday that Baghdad possessed start-to-finish plans to build an atomic bomb. At a news conference in Baghdad on Sunday, Amir Al-Saadi, an adviser to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, indicated Baghdad may have been close to developing an atomic bomb, though he did not say when.“We have the complete documentation from design to all the other things. We haven’t reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it,” he said. “It is for the IAEA to judge how close we were.” Iraq says the dossier, not yet made public, shows it has no weapons of mass destruction — an assertion that puts it on a collision course with Washington. In Baghdad, the arms inspectors searched Al-Tuweitha Nuclear Research Center yesterday, 20 km south of Baghdad, for the third time since their arrival. The facility was the location of the Osirak reactor, bombed in 1981 by Israel. Several tons of uranium have been under seal by the IAEA at Tuweitha since 1998. Other experts inspected a military industrial complex near the town of Fallujah 90 km northwest of Baghdad, repeatedly investigated by the UN and bombed by Western warplanes in the 1990s as a suspected chemical weapons center. Asked about estimates the inspection process could take up to a year, IAEA’s El- Baradei said in Tokyo: “I think that’s accurate.” Meanwhile, Iraq’s Parliament urged Arabs yesterday to seek martyrdom by attacking US forces in Kuwait, saying the Americans were preparing to occupy Iraq. “We in Iraq and in the entire (Arab) nation believe that every faithful Arab has the right, duty, and the honor to confront these forces (in Kuwait),” an unidentified spokesman for the assembly told the state Iraqi News Agency. Iraqi government has warned the United Nations of the risk of widely distributing the documents. The warning was signed by Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri at the end of an eight-page letter sent to the president of the UN Security Council. Wide distribution of the documents “entails risk” and could violate non-proliferation agreements, he said. (The Independent) Email this article <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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