U.S. expects Iraq to lie in declaration
By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — U.S. officials assume Iraq will not be truthful in the outline of its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs it must produce by Sunday.
The problem for the Bush administration: How does it prove Iraq is lying?
"President Bush has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. (Secretary of Defense) Donald Rumsfeld has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Thursday. "Iraq says they don't. You can choose who you want to believe."
Proof that Iraq has the weapons it claims not to possess could be grounds for war. So far, the administration hasn't produced evidence strong enough to convince most of its United Nations partners. That might begin to change once Iraq makes its weapons declaration, which it is required to do by the Nov. 8 U.N. resolution that restarted the weapons inspections.
Once U.S. officials digest the Iraqi declaration, which is expected to be several thousand pages long, they plan to supply U.N. weapons inspection teams with intelligence that they hope will point the inspectors to Iraqi weapons sites — creating a potential major confrontation as soon as next week.
Washington also will be pressing U.N. inspectors to add personnel, act more aggressively and conduct multiple inspections at the same time. In addition, U.S. officials will step up efforts to lure potential Iraqi defectors.
Former inspectors caution that this cloak-and-dagger search won't be easy. They say that although spot searches of Iraqi facilities can be effective, they seldom have yielded dramatic moments of discovery in the past.
When inspections have yielded results in Iraq, it took a painstaking combination of satellite imagery, aerial surveillance, trade data, the monitoring of Iraqi imports of sensitive technology and intensive interviews with Iraqi scientists and defectors to build the evidence that made the inspections successful, says former inspector Jonathan Tucker, a visiting fellow with the U.S. Institute for Peace.
"It was only by using this system's approach that inspectors made it difficult for Iraq to maintain false cover stories and allowed the fabric of lies to unravel," he says.
U.S. and British intelligence agencies say they believe that Iraq has hundreds of tons of chemical warfare agents and tens of thousands of liters of growth media for biological weapons, and that it has actively been trying to develop nuclear weapons since inspectors left Baghdad in 1998.
In the intervening four years, allied intelligence services have relied largely on satellite photos and defectors' accounts to try to track Iraqi weapons developments.
U.S. officials admit that now that inspectors have an opportunity to look inside the buildings that intelligence analysts have been observing from afar, they face a central problem: Iraq has had four years to hide any traces of banned materials.
Defectors have described networks of underground bunkers lined with lead where chemical and biological weapons have been stored. They claim to have seen mobile weapons labs, some disguised as milk and yogurt trucks or motor homes.
Defense intelligence officials say they believe that Iraq has moved some weapons materials into residential neighborhoods and even into private homes to try to evade international detection.
So how can inspectors succeed?
* Intelligence tips. U.S. officials say they have deliberately held back some key pieces of intelligence so Iraq doesn't get a chance to sanitize sites before it submits its weapons declaration. U.S. officials will begin supplying inspection teams with that guidance in an attempt to prove the Iraqi document is false.
But new rules for U.N. inspections established in 1999 in response to admissions that the CIA gave inspectors secret missions in 1998 strictly limit intelligence member states can provide.
Only one U.N. official — chief inspector Hans Blix — is authorized to receive intelligence tips, and U.N. teams are prohibited from reporting back to member governments about what they find after using intelligence data. Member states also are prohibited from analyzing any discoveries inspectors make; that will be done only by the United Nations.
* Technology. U.N. inspectors have an array of sophisticated tools at their disposal that were not available during past inspections and could be crucial to catching any Iraqi weapons development. They include ground-penetrating radar, scanners that are capable of detecting toxic microbes, and highly sensitive radiation readers.
* Defectors. Iraqi defectors have been crucial to uncovering Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's weapons ambitions. The defection of his son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, in 1995 forced Baghdad to reverse years of denials and admit the existence of sizable chemical, biological and nuclear programs. Kamal was murdered when he returned to Iraq that same year.
But defectors aren't a silver bullet. U.S. intelligence officials say many other Iraqi defectors have provided little hard evidence and often have told their interrogators whatever they wanted to hear in order to escape Saddam's regime.
The U.N. resolution passed last month authorizes inspectors to remove Iraqi government officials or scientists from the country for interviews. But Blix has indicated he is unlikely to do that, contending the practice is impractical.
* Establishing a pattern. U.S. officials say President Bush is unlikely to use any single event — including the declaration due this weekend — as a cause to take military action against Iraq. The resolution calls for "serious consequences" for Saddam if he does not cooperate with inspections.
Bush will not make a decision to use force "simply on the basis of one single piece of information," Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said this week during a stop in Brussels. "He's going to make it not only on the pattern of information but also close consultation, particularly with our allies but indeed with the international community."
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