The United States’s preliminary evaluation of Iraq’s arms declaration found the 12 000-page document is mostly recycled information from the last report in 1998, The New York Times said on Friday.
”Some of the more hawkish among us just want to say that the whole thing is laughable, and it is all the legal justification we need,” one senior US official told the daily.
The Washington Post reported in its Friday edition that the Bush administration wants Iraq to give UN weapons inspectors access to Iraqi scientists abroad ”soon” to explain these gaps of information and for ”clarifying details”, or face the consequences of ”non-cooperation”.
If Iraq is found by the UN Security Council to be non-compliant it risks a UN endorsed military strike to forcibly disarm Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s regime.
”What’s remarkable is how little new there is, and how little effort there was to try to explain gaps that everyone knew were there since” the UN arms inspectors left four years ago, another US official who has access to the document told the Times.
A UN diplomat familiar with Iraq’s report said ”our preliminary assessment” is that much of the declaration ”seems to be recycled”.
Citing unnamed US intelligence sources and UN officials, the daily said the new report fails to even account for arms which had been documented by UN inspectors in 1998.
Referring to examples of unaccounted arms such as 550 shells of mustard gas, and 150 bombs filled with biological agents the United Nations documented in the 1990s, another US official told the Times there were ”omissions big enough to drive a tank through”.
Iraq handed over the mammoth declaration on Sunday in compliance UN Security Council resolution 1441 of November 8.
UN weapons inspectors left Iraq four years ago ahead of US, British and French air strikes on the Middle Eastern country.
Iraqi officials have repeatedly said the declaration proves it has no weapons of mass destruction, which the United States and Britain allege Baghdad has been developing.
Besides chemical and biological weapons, Iraq also sent a declaration on its nuclear programme, which it says, was abandoned on 1991.
According to the Times the declaration sheds light on Iraq’s programme before 1991, but says nothing new since that time, raising questions on why it would have been shopping for enriched uranium in Africa, as British intelligence sources have reported.
Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency told the daily that the 2 400-page section on Iraq’s nuclear programme they received was similar, if not identical, to a December 1998 Iraqi declaration.
White House representative Ari Fleischer has said repeatedly over the last week that if Iraq is found to have lied or omitted information in the report it would be a violation of the Security Council resolution and a possible basis for military action against Iraq.
”We gave them that chance,” another official told the Times.
”They knew what issues were outstanding in 1998. They blew it.”
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council’s five permanent members were busy deciding which sensitive paragraphs should be cut from the Iraqi text before it is released to the 10 remaining Security Council members.
Proposed cuts in the document are aimed at expunging details on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and sites that might fall into the wrong hands in violation of treaties on non-proliferation of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
So far only the Security Council’s Big Five — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, all nuclear powers ‒ have had access to the text. The 10 remaining members are all non-nuclear states. – Sapa-AFP