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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (18241)	12/4/2002 7:16:24 PM
From: lorne	Respond to of 23908

Rumsfeld: We Don't Need U.N.'s Permission Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2002 A shocking assertion of American sovereignty: If the U.S. is dissatisfied with Iraq's weapons declaration, it does not need the U.N. Security Council's approval to take military action, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said today. "Everyone does not have to agree for any member country to take appropriate action," he told reporters at the Pentagon. If Baghdad does not confess to having chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs by its deadline Sunday, the United States and Great Britain have intelligence to show it is lying, he said. He refused to suggest a misleading declaration by Iraq this weekend would lead to war. That is "a decision for the president, the Security Council, other countries to make judgments about. It's not for me," he said. "I've ... indicated that it's not for me to say what the United States will or will not accept. That is a matter for the president." The burden is not on the United States or the weapons inspectors to prove Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld said: The dictator must prove that he holster is empty. Damned if You Do ... "The United States knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The U.K. knows that they have weapons of mass destruction. Any country on the face of the earth with an active intelligence program knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfeld said. "It is not for some country to go in and give them a clean bill of health, it is for Iraq to give itself a clean bill of health by saying: 'Here's honestly what we currently have. Here's where it is. Here's what we've done. Please destroy it for us,'" Rumsfeld said. Rumsfeld doubted that inspections would turn up any evidence of weapons of mass destruction. "You can't expect people to go into a country that is just enormous, with all that real estate and all that underground facilities and all of these people monitoring everything, everything anyone is doing, and expect them to engage in a discovery process and turn up something somebody is determined for them not to turn up," he said. "If you go back and look at the history of inspections in Iraq, the reality is that things have been found not by discovery, but through defectors, ... and you get the kind of information that means the game is up." worldtribune.com