This might be one reason TISAF stock hasn't been doing anything.
Iraq's deadly arsenal exposed
EXCLUSIVE By TANIA EWING
It's the arsenal Iraq's President Saddam Hussein doesn't want the world to know about. Warheads for at least nine Scud missiles, able to reach Israel, and 26,000 litres of weapons-grade anthrax capable of killing hundreds of thousands remain unaccounted for, and possibly stockpiled, by the Iraqi Government, according to a senior member of the United Nations weapons inspection team.
Australian Rod Barton, principal UN inspector investigating Iraq's biological weapons, who was evicted from Baghdad on 5August by President Saddam, believes his weapons inspection team was too close to finding the hoard.
''We (the UN inspection teams) were getting very close to uncovering the last 5 per cent of Iraq's weapons'' and Saddam couldn't accept that he would have to explain them or give them up, he told The Age.
A fortnight ago, President Saddam kicked out those remaining inspectors who monitored civilian factories, which can switch from making benign medicines and fertilisers to biological weapons. According to Mr Barton, this is the first time in seven years that the world has no idea what Iraq is doing. ''They could be building up their weapons program, they could be moving it around, we just don't know,'' he said.
Mr Barton, who is based in Canberra, returned to Australia last Sunday after three weeks of discussions with the UN Security Council and the Australian head of the weapons inspection team, Richard Butler. In a meeting between the two Australians last Friday, Mr Barton said they agreed that President Saddam's latest act of brinkmanship, by evicting the UN teams, ''is different from (his) other acts of defiance''.
As other international reports last night suggested a further 17 tonnes of growth media needed to produce biological agents were unaccounted for, the United States declared its patience exhausted and prepared to launch military strikes against Iraq after both sides ruled out compromise over arms inspections. In other signs of an imminent attack, the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, cut short a trip to North Africa for a meeting on the crisis yesterday with Security Council members.
UNSCOM's entire staff and support personnel, including 11 International Atomic Energy Agency experts, have now left Iraq. Only remote-control monitoring equipment remains.
Using documents from countries that sold the weapons or chemical and biological agents to Iraq, weapons inspectors have located and destroyed 38,000 chemical weapons components, 474,000 litres of chemical weapons agents, 48 operational missiles, six missile launchers and 30 special missile warheads for chemical and biological weapons. They also blew up a factory capable of producing 50,000 litres of the deadly germ warfare agents.
In January, US Navy scientists detected traces of the nerve agent VX on warheads buried in Iraq. President Saddam responded to the results by preventing UN access to major sites in Iraq suspected by the inspection teams of harboring biological weapons.
While US warships headed for the Persian Gulf, Mr Annan stepped in and agreed to President Saddam's demands that the suspect warheads be independently tested for VX by European scientists.
The results came back in August. French scientists found no evidence of the deadly nerve gas, but Swiss scientists did. Mr Butler told The Age in August that the results were given ''discretely'' to Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, who refused to discuss them. On 4August, the day after he received the scientific analysis, Mr Butler and his teams were thrown out of Iraq.
For the past year, Mr Barton and the rest of the UN inspection teams have been reconstructing weapons from large pits at Al-Azzizziyah, about 70 kilometres outside Baghdad.
The pits are the repository of much of what President Saddam wants kept hidden.
According to Mr Barton, Iraq has always maintained that its entire chemical and biological weapons arsenal was placed in these pits with explosives and destroyed.
This year the UN inspectors have been trying to piece together this jigsaw of broken machinery, unsure of whether underneath the rubble lie unexploded warheads or unstable bombs ready to explode. ''It has been an enormous, and dangerous, forensic exercise,'' Mr Barton said.
By the middle of the year, the inspection teams had reassembled most of the weapons in the quarry - and it did not tally with what the Iraqis had told them was there, or with what the UN inspection teams knew had been imported into the country in the late 1980s from allies such as Russia.
''We were missing seven Scud warheads and enough components to reverse-engineer (copy from the Russian missiles) another two missiles,'' Mr Barton said.
Given the Iraqis' expertise in rejigging missiles, it is likely these warheads could reach Israel, with the very real risk that they could carry biological or chemical weapons. Mr Barton says the Iraqis have already worked out how to lighten the missiles so that they can reach Tel Aviv.
For the past three weeks, Mr Barton has been trying to determine what biological weapons remain in Iraq.
At least two tonnes of culture medium crucial for growing anthrax bacteria is missing - enough to make 26,000 litres of weapons-grade anthrax, he told Mr Butler last week.
The Iraqi Government has maintained that the culture's expiry date has passed and that the culture was dumped. Mr Barton is not convinced. He has met the two European companies that make the culture and, while they admit that the culture is officially active for only five years, ''if kept in a hot dry environment, just like Iraq, then (the media) can be used for 10 to15 years'', he said.
Published by The Age Online Pty Ltd ACN 069 962 885
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