Weapons Equipment Missing In Iraq

UNITED NATIONS - U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

In the report to the U.N. Security Council, acting chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos said he's reached no conclusions about who removed the items or where they went. He said it could have been moved elsewhere in Iraq, sold as scrap, melted down or purchased.

He said the missing material can be used for legitimate purposes. "However, they can also be utilized for prohibited purposes if in a good state of repair."

He said imagery analysts have identified 109 sites that have been emptied of equipment to varying degrees, up from 90 reported in March.

The report also provided much more detail about the percentage of items no longer at the places where U.N. inspectors monitored them.

From the imagery analysis, Perricos said analysts at the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission which he heads have concluded that biological sites were less damaged than chemical and missile sites.

The commission, known as UNMOVIC, previously reported the discovery of some equipment and material from the sites in scrapyards in Jordan and the Dutch port of Rotterdam.

Perricos said analysts found, for example, that 53 of the 98 vessels that could be used for a wide range of chemical reactions had disappeared. "Due to its characteristics, this equipment can be used for the production of both commercial chemicals and chemical warfare agents," he said.

The report said 3,380 valves, 107 pumps, and more than 7.8 miles of pipes were known to have been located at the 39 chemical sites.

A third of the chemical items removed came from the Qaa Qaa industrial complex south of Baghdad which the report said "was among the sites possessing the highest number of dual-use production equipment," whose fate is now unknown." Significant quantities of missing material were also located at the Fallujah II and Fallujah III facilities north of the city, which was besieged last year.

Before the first Gulf War in 1991, those facilities played a major part in the production of precursors for Iraq's chemical warfare program.

The percentages of missing biological equipment from 12 sites were much smaller - no higher than 10 percent.

The report said 37 of 405 fermenters ranging in size from 2 gallons to 1,250 gallons had been removed. Those could be used to produce pharmaceuticals and vaccines as well as biological warfare agents such as anthrax.

The largest percentages of missing items were at the 58 missile facilities, which include some of the key production sites for both solid and liquid propellant missiles, the report said.

For example, 289 of the 340 pieces of equipment to produce missiles - about 85 percent - had been removed, it said.

At the Kadhimiyah and Al Samoud factory sites in suburban Baghdad, where the report said airframes and engines for liquid propellant missiles were manufactured and final assembly was carried out, "all equipment and missile components have been removed."

UNMOVIC is the outgrowth of a U.N. inspections process created after the 1991 Gulf War in which invading Iraqi forces were ousted from Kuwait. Its staff are considered the only multinational weapons experts specifically trained in biological weapons and missile disarmament.

The report noted that the commissioners who advise UNMOVIC again raised questions about its future. Iraq has called for its Security Council mandate to be terminated because UNMOVIC is funded from past Iraqi oil sales and it wants to be treated like other countries, but the council has not taken up the issue.

France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere said Thursday the commission's expertise "should not be lost for the international community."

This is actually an old story, although what's news here is that perhaps the UN is starting to change its claims that the material wasn't "dual use" material afterall. Here's an article from the AP last year (sorry, I didn't keep the date of the article, but the date of the key UN testimony on this is in the text.)

Evidence that Saddam frantically scrapped WMD hardware

Revelations that Saddam moved some of his WMDs and hardware out of the country were further confirmed by Demetrius Perricos, acting chairman of UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), who disclosed that his inspectors had been tracking shipments of illicit Iraqi WMD components around the world.

The Associated Press announced that UNMOVIC inspectors have found dozens of engines from banned al-Samoud 2 (SA2) missiles, which were shipped out of Iraq as "scrap metal."

UNMOVIC agents found 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with a great deal of other WMD materials. Officials discovered an identical engine in a Rotterdam port in the Netherlands and believe as many as a dozen extra SA-2 missile engines alone have been transported out of Iraq and remain unaccounted for.

Besides the SA-2 engines, inspectors also found Iraqi "dual use" technology in Jordan, items purportedly employed in civilian affairs that can be used to create or enhance deadly weapons systems. The New York Times noted that among those items were "fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons."

UN spokesman Ewen Buchanan put the threat of "dual use" technology into perspective. "You can make all kinds of pharmaceutical and medicinal products with a fermenter," Buchanan said. "You can also use it to breed anthrax."

Before the war, Saddam's regime cast its possession of "dual use" materials in the most innocent light, a ruse familiar to students of the Cold War. UNMOVIC wisely rejected his sunny assessment.

As Reuter's reported...”’A number of sites which contained dual-use equipment that was previously monitored by UN inspectors has [sic.] been systematically taken apart,’ said Ewen Buchanan, spokesman for the New York-based inspectors. ‘The question this raises is what happened to equipment known to have been there. Where is it now? It's a concern,’ Buchanan asked.”

"...The report said the U.N. inspectors also found papers showing illegal contracts by Iraq for a missile guidance system, laser ring gyroscopes and a variety of production and testing equipment not previously disclosed.”

Many of the “dual use” components UNMOVIC found in foreign ports had been previous tagged by UN inspectors in Iraq before the war. And transfers had taking place rapidly. During his presentation, Perricos showed the UN Security Council a picture of a fully developed missile site in May 2002 that had been entirely torn down by February of 2003.

Perricos' June 9, 2004, UN testimony was made all the more credible by the fact that he is hardly a neo-con stalwart. USA Today described his mindset just three months ago: "Demetrius Perricos, acting head of the United Nations weapons inspection program, can't disguise his satisfaction that almost a year after the invasion of Iraq, U.S. inspectors have found the same thing that their much-maligned UN counterparts did before the war: no banned weapons." Today, Perricos' smile has disappeared.

All these revelations came during a closed meeting of the UN Security Council held on June 9, 2004. However, the investigations are not new. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) launched its own probe into Iraqi WMD transfers a full six months previous to the UNMOVIC report when a Dutch scrap metal company discovered five pounds of yellowcake uranium ore in Rotterdam, according to an April 14, 2004, news report in the Washington Post.

The sample was shipped from Jordan but Jordanian officials said the metal originated in Iraq. (Perhaps this is the yellowcake that atomic sleuth Joe Wilson insisted Iraq never purchased from Niger...the purchase of which had subsequently been re-confirmed by the London Financial Times). Even the once skeptical IAEA Director Mohammed El Baradei warned that evidence of Saddam's WMDs was being shipped abroad.

Yes, and there's also this:

The U.S. intelligence assessment was discussed publicly for the first time by the director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in a briefing in Washington on Tuesday, October 28.

James Clapper, a retired air force general and a leading member of the U.S. intelligence community, said he linked the disappearance of Iraqi WMD with the huge number of Iraqi trucks that entered Syria before and during the U.S. military campaign to topple the Saddam regime.

"I think personally that the [Iraqi] senior leadership saw what was coming and I think they went to some extraordinary lengths to dispose of the evidence," Clapper said. "I'll call it an educated hunch."

Officials said the intelligence community assessed that the trucks contained missiles and WMD components banned by the United Nations Security Council.

Clapper said Iraqi officials feared U.S. discovery of Iraqi biological and chemical weapons, and ordered subordinates to conceal and destroy evidence of WMD in early 2003. He said he was certain that components connected to Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear programs were sent to Syria in the weeks prior to and during the war, which began on March 19.

"I think probably in the few months prior to the onset of combat, there was probably an intensive effort to disperse to private homes, to move documentation and materials out of the country," Clapper said. "But certainly, inferentially, the obvious conclusion one draws is that the certain uptick in traffic [to Syria] may have been people leaving the scene, fleeing Iraq, and unquestionably, I am sure, material."

The chief of the NIMA, which was renamed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in November 2003, acknowledged that U.S. spy satellites did not identify the cargo transported by the Iraqi trucks into Syria. He said that much of the Iraqi WMD remained in the country and was either concealed or destroyed even as the U.S. military captured Baghdad in April.

Clapper said he suspected that the looting throughout Sunni cities in Iraq in April was directed by Saddam loyalists to serve as a diversion for the destruction or transfer of WMD components from government or other installations targeted by U.S. intelligence. The United States has never found biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in Iraq.

"So by the time that we got to a lot of these facilities, that we had previously identified as suspect facilities, there wasn't that much there to look at," Clapper said.

"Based on the evidence we had at the time, I thought the conclusions we reached about the presence of at least a latent WMD program was accurate and balanced," Clapper said.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, told the Washington Times in October of 2004 that he had received foreign intelligence information that Russian special forces units were involved in removing Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. (http://washingtontimes.com/national/20041229-113041-1647r.htm)

A letter written by Shaw to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that information about the covert Russian role in moving Iraqi arms to Syria, Lebanon and possibly Iran was discussed during a meeting that included NGIA head James Clapper, the head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence service, and the head of a foreign intelligence service that he did not name.

After Shaw’s disclosures, the Pentagon released spy satellite photographs of Iraqi weapons facilities that showed truck convoys at the plants, apparently in preparation to transport materials.

For his troubles, Shaw was asked to resign from his DoD position in December 2004, due to his “exceeding his authority” in releasing the story to the media of Russian troop involvement in removing Saddam’s WMDs.

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