Posted 12/9/2002 12:15 AM Updated 12/9/2002 6:51 AM

Inspectors search for clues in Iraq report

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — International inspectors began hunting through a massive Iraqi arms declaration for clues about whether the country is free of weapons of mass destruction, after Iraq challenged Washington to produce evidence that it has banned arms.

U.S. officials will soon be able to start their own review of the documents after the Security Council agreed late Sunday to give the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China full copies of the 12,000-page declaration on Monday.

The decision overrode one made Friday to distribute censored copies to the council. The council's other 10 members will only have access to the report once inspectors have translated, analyzed and gleaned it of sensitive material — including possible instructions on bomb-making.

On Sunday, an adviser to President Saddam Hussein suggested that in the years before the 1991 Gulf War Iraq may have been close to building an atomic bomb. Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi said Iraq no longer has such ambitions.

"It's for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to judge how close we were" to a nuclear bomb, al-Saadi said in Baghdad.

Al-Saadi said the United States should stop playing games and hand over its evidence that Iraq has banned weapons.

"The sooner they do it the better," he told reporters.

Iraq insists it has no programs for developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

In Iraq, U.N. arms inspectors made a return visit Monday to Iraq's huge al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex, where scientists in the 1980s worked to produce the fissionable material for nuclear bombs.

In Tokyo, the chief nuclear arms inspector said Monday that war can be avoided if continued inspections prove that Iraq poses no nuclear threat.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said a careful analysis to ensure Iraq has disarmed could help steer the world away from a bloody military conflict.

"If we succeed in providing a thorough analysis on the report and if we succeed in making sure Iraq is disarmed through an inspection, that I think could lead to the avoidance of a use of force," ElBaradei said at a Tokyo conference on nuclear safeguards.

On Sunday, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said his staff would "immediately take a look," at the Iraqi material, make copies and discuss the report's handling with the Security Council. He is expected to brief all 15 council members on Tuesday.

The head of the IAEA said his staff could have a report ready on the nuclear section of the dossier within 10 days but it could take longer to weed through, analyze and translate thousands of pages and CD-ROMs dealing with Iraq's biological, chemical and missile programs.

The declaration, which was handed to inspectors in Baghdad Saturday, arrived at U.N. offices in New York and Vienna late Sunday, the deadline for its submission. But the real test will be the document's transparency, which could determine whether Iraq will face another war with the United States and its allies.

Under the terms of Security Council Resolution 1441, passed on Nov. 8, any false statements or omissions in the declaration, coupled with a failure by Iraq to comply with inspections, "shall constitute a further material breach of Iraq's obligations."

Such a breach could be enough for Washington to argue that military action is the only way to force Iraq to comply with the resolution.

Iraq had until Sunday to provide a full and complete accounting of its weapons programs. The council has insisted on such an accounting for years, and in the past Iraq provided partial reports which were updated only after inspectors discovered programs which were not included.

In Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov said Iraq's declaration created "not a bad basis" for resolving the Iraq crisis politically.

Under successive resolutions, passed since the 1991 Persian Gulf War ousted Saddam's troops from neighboring Kuwait, the Security Council has demanded that Iraq disarm and comply with a weapons inspections regime. Only after inspectors declare Iraq in compliance can 12 years of crippling sanctions, imposed after the Iraqi invasion, be suspended.

The White House has warned that continued Iraqi attempts to hide banned arms could lead to military retaliation.

Last week, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said there was a "solid basis" for assertions that Saddam possessed banned weapons and that the United States would provide that intelligence to U.N. inspectors. However, that evidence has not been forthcoming and Blix has continued to ask Washington to share its data.

Asked Sunday whether he was bothered by Washington's criticism of Iraqi compliance with his inspectors thus far, Blix said: "I'm not concerned about that. They will have their reaction, and we will have our study."

The nuclear component of the new declaration will be analyzed by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The chemical, biological and missile components of the dossier will be analyzed and translated by Blix's U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC.

Inspectors from both organizations returned to Iraq last month to conduct inspectors for the first time in four years.

ElBaradei, the IAEA's director-general, said the declaration would be cross-checked with data Iraq has previously provided, evidence from past inspections and intelligence submitted by foreign governments.

The IAEA hopes to provide the Security Council with a preliminary analysis within 10 days and a more detailed analysis when it reports back to the council at the end of January, ElBaradei said.

Blix said it would take some time for his team to sift through its sections of the documents, translate the Arabic portions and remove so-called sensitive material — such as the know-how to build atomic bombs — which could get into the wrong hands.

On Saturday, Iraq turned over the latest declaration to U.N. officials in Baghdad — a day before the deadline set out in Resolution 1441.

The complete declaration, in Arabic and English with an 80-page summary, was contained in at least a dozen bound volumes accompanied by computer disks. They were brought into U.N. headquarters in two, small suitcases.

The declaration covers the 1990s U.N. weapons inspection regime in Iraq, when many arms and much production equipment were destroyed, and also details "dual-use" industries that can serve both civilian and military purposes.

Inspectors said they expect much of the declaration to include repetitious material that was submitted years ago.

-- Anonymous, December 09, 2002