Iraqi Arms Dossier Seen as Rehashing Old Data

The Los Angeles Times ^ | 12/12/2002 | Bob Drogin

[GeneD]

WASHINGTON -- The CIA delivered an initial assessment of Iraq's declaration of banned weapons programs to the White House on Wednesday amid growing concerns that the bulk of the 12,000-page dossier consists of previously discredited Iraqi reports.

In particular, officials said, Iraq's account of its nuclear weapons program — totaling 2,081 pages, including a 113-page executive summary — appears to be largely a duplicate of Iraqi declarations delivered to U.N. inspectors in 1996 and 1997.

Thousands more pages that Iraq submitted over the weekend on its biological and chemical weapons programs also appear to be copies of reports that U.N. weapons inspectors repeatedly rejected as inadequate and incomplete between 1995 and 1998, officials said.

"The initial conclusion is there's nothing really new," said one official who is assisting in the review. "What I'm hearing is it's all recycled and [Iraqi claims that] it didn't do anything wrong."

The U.S. analysts are especially looking to see whether Iraq has adequately answered scores of questions left unresolved during the U.N. inspections that ended in 1998, and whether it can explain a body of intelligence since 1998 suggesting that Baghdad has rebuilt at least some of its proscribed weapons programs.

Several Arabic-language portions of the report, including a 300-page section that details Iraqi industrial and other facilities involved in nuclear research or development, have now been translated and are undergoing what the official called a "line-by-line review to see if [Iraq] inserted something that wasn't in previous reports.... Nothing has emerged yet."

[GeneD]

I'm so surprised.