U.S. weapons inspector's report on Iraq weapon-building potential false: UN
NEW YORK (AP) - U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer's report concluding Iraq might have resumed weapons-building "after sanctions were removed," left out the crucial fact the UN Security Council had planned controls over Baghdad for years to come, UN officials said Saturday.
The Security Council, led by the United States, decreed inspections and disarmament of Iraq were to be followed by tough, open-ended monitoring.
"It's been a little disturbing," said Demetrius Perricos, chief UN weapons inspector.
"All the arguments say that when sanctions ended, Saddam Hussein would have had a free hand. By the council's own resolutions that wasn't so."
Ronald Cleminson, a retired Canadian intelligence officer and veteran member of the UN commission that oversaw Iraq's disarmament, said he believes U.S. officials intentionally played down UN effectiveness and future monitoring plans.
Otherwise, "they could not have set up a scenario with which one goes to war," Cleminson said.
In his Oct. 6 report, CIA adviser Duelfer discredited President George W. Bush's stated rationale for invading Iraq, saying his Iraq Survey Group found no weapons of mass destruction. But he suggested Iraq might still have posed a threat.
Saddam "wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capability - which was essentially destroyed in 1991 - after sanctions were removed," the report said, though adding no such formal plan was uncovered.
This Duelfer finding became a new focus for the Bush administration. Vice-President Dick Cheney told one audience Oct. 7: "As soon as the sanctions were lifted, (Saddam) had every intention of going back" to weapons-building.
An academic expert on the Iraq inspections regime was among those disputing this, noting lifting the UN Embargo would not have opened that door.
"This is not the case under Resolution 687 and later ones," said Yale University's James Sutterlin.
Years of Security Council resolutions preceding the 2003 U.S.-British invasion mandated UN arms monitors would remain in Iraq once Baghdad's WMD programs were shut down - as Duelfer now acknowledges they were in the 1990s. With unusual powers and the best technology, the monitors in this second stage would "prevent Iraq from developing new capabilities," said a blueprint for the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification (OMV) program.
Resolutions also stipulated UN trade sanctions would not be lifted until the ongoing monitoring program was in place - and lifted then only for civilian goods.
The Security Council, where Washington has a veto, would decide how long to keep monitoring in place. Perricos said it was expected to last years.
"You couldn't have disarmament and stop monitoring afterward," he said.
In 19 pages of Key Findings, however, while raising the prospect of future threats, the Duelfer report ignores this plan to prevent them.
The CIA and Duelfer had no comment this week when asked why the role of Ongoing Monitoring and Verification went unacknowledged.
Official U.S. statements consistently disregarding this follow-up stage in Iraq arms control seem to have had an effect.
"Most people don't understand that there was to be a permanent monitoring system in place to deter any return to WMD," said Jean Krasno of the City University of New York, co-author with Sutterlin of the 2003 book The United Nations and Iraq.
In 2002, the Bush administration had demanded and voted for renewed UN inspections in Iraq. Then, in the lead-up to war, it publicly questioned their effectiveness, even as UN experts were conducting 700 inspections and finding no WMD.
In early 2003, the inspectors said they could formally certify Iraqi disarmament with several more months' work, after which long-term monitoring would take over. In preparation, they set up a northern office in Mosul and bought $5 million US worth of high-technology surveillance cameras.
The U.S. attack then aborted the UN work.
The monitoring program would have covered hundreds of sites, from Iraq's nuclear complex to pesticide plants and breweries that might concoct chemical or biological weapons. It was originally envisioned as a $70-million-a-year operation with a staff of 350.
The inspectors would have been armed with sensors, sampling devices and remote video systems and would have continued onsite inspections and interviews of ex-weapon scientists. They also would have monitored sites via aerial surveillance, had the right to inspect vehicles and monitored Iraqi imports of civilian goods with potential military uses.
David Kay, Duelfer's predecessor as chief of the CIA weapons hunt, said: "OMV was discounted" because it was believed "that the Iraqis over time would find out how to manipulate the cameras, sampling methods, occasional visits."
The UN experts disputed this. Inspector spokesman Ewen Buchanan noted, for example, the remote cameras could even broadcast to analysts that they've been tampered with. Besides, the arms-control specialists said, Kay was discounting a system the world now knows disarmed Iraq without going to war.
"What happened in Iraq was that an international body of the UN went over, did the job and came out with results," Perricos said.
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