Iraq says inspectors are spies
Posted on 12/05/2002 4:32:37 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Iraq says inspectors are spies
U.N. team says it's getting results, balancing demands
12/05/2002
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq protested sharply Wednesday over U.N. weapons inspectors' surprise intrusion into one of Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces, accusing the arms experts of being spies who staged the search as a provocation that could lead to war.
The harshest criticism came from Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, who charged - in language reminiscent of clashes with inspectors in the 1990s - that the new teams of U.N. monitors were gathering intelligence for Washington and Israel.
"Their work is to spy to serve the CIA and Mossad," Israel's intelligence service, Mr. Ramadan told a visiting delegation of Egyptian professionals.
Mr. Ramadan said that the inspectors went to the palace hoping to provoke the Iraqis into refusing them entrance - something he said would be interpreted as a "material breach" of the U.N. resolution that required the inspections, and a cause for war.
| Also Online | ||||||||||
|
Responding to Iraqi protests over Tuesday's palace visit, a U.N. official countered that the inspectors are taking the right approach - navigating between Iraqi complaints and U.S. pressure for more "severe" inspections. And, said inspections team leader Demetrius Perricos, "we are getting results."
Among other things, Mr. Perricos reported that on a five-hour inspection of a desert installation his experts secured a dozen Iraqi artillery shells - previously known to be there - that were loaded with a powerful chemical weapon, the agent for mustard gas. It was the first report of such armaments traced and controlled in the week-old round of new inspections.
The inspections resumed last week after a four-year suspension, under a new U.N. Security Council resolution requiring Iraq to surrender any remaining weapons of mass destruction and shut down any programs to make them.
A critical deadline approaches this weekend for the Baghdad government. Saturday, a day ahead of the deadline, Iraq is expected to submit a declaration to the United Nations on any weapons of mass destruction, as well as on nuclear, chemical and biological programs that it says are peaceful.
The Bush administration alleges that Baghdad retains some chemical and biological weapons and that it has not abandoned plans for nuclear weapons. Washington threatens to go to war against Iraq if it fails to disarm.
The Iraqi government maintains that it no longer holds such weapons.
The inspectors' new mandate toughens their powers to search anywhere, anytime in Iraq for signs of prohibited armaments. They took advantage of that authority Tuesday to demand and receive quick entry to the Al-Sajoud palace, beside the Tigris River in Baghdad, one of dozens of palaces built by Mr. Hussein during his 23-year rule.
The 1 ½-hour inspection was a symbolic show of U.N. muscle.
"We consider the entry of the presidential sites as unjustified and really unnecessary," Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, chief Iraqi liaison to the inspectors, told reporters Wednesday. A Foreign Ministry statement described it as "bad behavior." Gen. Amin added, however, that Iraq would not try to block U.N. visits to other palaces.
The U.N. teams are picking up where their predecessors left off in 1998, when the monitoring program collapsed amid disputes.
The inspectors of the 1990s eliminated tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and the equipment to make them and dismantled Iraq's program to build nuclear bombs.
Mr. Perricos' team and another paid unannounced visits to that key site and to the nerve center of Iraq's old nuclear weapons program, places that were bombed, searched and dismantled in the 1990s.
The desolate al-Muthanna State Establishment, among camel herds and wild dogs in the desert 40 miles northwest of Baghdad, was Iraq's most important chemical weapons research and production facility in the 1980s and was heavily bombed in the 1991 Gulf War.
Later in the 1990s, the U.N. inspectors moved into the site and destroyed huge amounts of material: 38,500 artillery shells and other chemical-filled weapons, almost 500,000 gallons of liquid material, and 150 pieces of equipment used to make chemical agents, according to a recent Iraqi report.
Allowed onto the 10-square- mile installation after the inspectors left, journalists saw the 1990s inspectors' handiwork, in storage sheds with huge industrial vats and crumpled empty bomb casings strewn about - remnants of an enterprise that made some of the most feared chemical weapons, including the nerve agents sarin and VX.
The discarded equipment was inventoried and tagged by the old monitors, and the new team wanted to check that no machinery had been put back into service.
"They found things as they were in 1998, and there's no activity now at this site," Raad Manhal, Iraqi liaison officer at the site, told reporters.
Mr. Perricos later said the arms experts had found "between 10 and 20" artillery shells, loaded with the chemical weapons agent mustard, which had been recorded at the site but had not been destroyed because of the abrupt collapse of inspections in 1998. His team secured the shells in their storage place and planned to destroy them, he said.
The second team went to al-Tuwaitha, long the heart of Iraqi nuclear research, where scientists and engineers in the 1980s worked on technology to produce fuel for nuclear bombs.
Al-Tuwaitha, 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, also was heavily bombed and later monitored in the 1990s. Recent satellite photos show new construction at the sprawling complex, however, and the nuclear specialists wanted to check those buildings.
 |
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my General Interest ping list!. . .don't be shy. 
 |
| Wed Dec 4, 3:17 PM ET |
|
A herd of camels walk past the entrance of the Al-Muthanna state establishment 70 kms (40 miles) north west of Baghdad after U.N. weapons inspectors entered the complex Wednesday Dec. 4, 2002. |
(THAT is world ORDER!)
Just say, 'NO'.
Spies and opium do NOT exist!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
