US and UK admit lack of 'killer' proof
Whitehall puts onus on Saddam to show banned arms have gone
Julian Borger in Washington, Nick Paton-Walsh in Moscow, Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor
Tuesday December 10, 2002
The Guardian
The US and Britain lack "killer" intelligence that will prove conclusively that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, according to sources in London and New York. "If we had intelligence that there is a piece of weaponry at this map reference, we would tell the inspectors and they would be there like a shot," a source said.
After handing over 12,000 pages of documentation to UN weapons inspectors, Iraq challenged the US and Britain to produce evidence that it still has weapons of mass destruction.
The US and Britain will insist the onus is on Iraq to prove that it has no weapons of mass destruction, as it claims, rather than for them to prove that it does. Whitehall sources yesterday stood by their claims that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and that this was "based not on what we say but on what we know".
But they said that passing the intelligence to the UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, would alert the Iraqis to the activities of US intelligence and might jeopardise its secret sources.
UN weapons inspectors in New York and Vienna began studying the Iraqi paperwork yesterday. The five permanent members of the UN security council, the US, Britain, France, China and Russia, also received copies of the documents.
In Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that much of the 2,400-page nuclear annexe appeared to be a copy of a declaration Iraq had made four years ago, repeating its account of how the country's nuclear weapons had been dismantled after the 1991 Gulf war.
An additional Arabic language section, 300 pages long, gave details of more recent activity, according to an IAEA spokeswoman, Melissa Fleming.
The Arabic text was titled, Activities that could be interpreted as nuclear-related 1991-2002, suggesting that it dealt with "dual-use" items, such as radioactive material used in hospital scanners. Ms Fleming said the IAEA's three Arabic-speaking experts had begun analysing the document on Sunday night as soon as it arrived in Vienna, but added that it would take several days to finish the work.
Meanwhile, another group of IAEA specialists is working on the other 2,100 pages in English. Ms Fleming said the IAEA would not give a full assessment of the document until its head, Mohammed el-Baradei, addressed the UN security council on December 19.
She said the nuclear agency was hoping to cross-check the document against information supplied by the world's intelligence agencies, as envisaged in last month's security council resolution on disarmament.
"We've been told the intelligence would be forthcoming after the declaration has been delivered," Ms Fleming said.
US officials said that the CIA and national laboratories specialising in chemical, biological and nuclear warfare had begun an analysis of the entire Iraqi declaration, and had been told to focus on a handful of Iraqi claims that could be proved false with available intelligence.
They also said that American analysts would look for Iraqi explanations of what had happened to thousands of tonnes of chemical and biological agents, and equipment used in the construction of nuclear weapons that were not accounted for in Iraq's 1998 declaration.
Russia indicated yesterday that it was ready to support military action against Baghdad if Iraq breaks any UN resolution, while the Kremlin's foreign ministry welcomed the Iraqi declaration as a "basis for [settling] the problem within political and diplomatic channels".
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