Busiest Arms Inspections Day Yet
Reinforced with newly arrived staff, U.N. inspectors stepped up their searches Saturday, visiting a dozen sites in Iraq - including rooms at an infectious disease center where they were denied access a day earlier.
CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan says it was the most inspections in a single day since the teams returned to Iraq on Nov. 27 after a four-year hiatus. Hiro Ueki, a spokesman for the U.N. program in Baghdad, said inspectors had visited a total 70 sites to date.
After their first known snag, inspectors revisited the Communicable Disease Control Center in Baghdad on Saturday, entering rooms that had been locked on Friday.
Inspectors said in a statement that there was no sign of tampering with seals they applied to doors and windows at the center when they were denied access. They said Saturday's inspection lasted about an hour.
Iraqi officials said the rooms had been locked because Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, is a day off for doctors and other workers who had keys.
With the arrival of 15 additional inspectors Saturday, the total now stands at 113.
But even though the number of inspections is up, and much needed equipment such as helicopters is finally beginning to arrive, three weeks of inspecting suspicious sites have turned up little more than doubt, correspondent Cowan says.
Iraq received chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix's demand Saturday for a list of all personnel currently and formerly associated with the country's chemical, biological and ballistic missile programs, a U.N. official said.
The U.N. Security Council resolution that ordered the resumed inspections authorizes teams to interview any Iraqi inside the country and without Iraqi officials present, or to take the person out of Iraq with his or her family.
One site visited Saturday was the main Iraqi nuclear center where nearly two tons of low-grade enriched uranium are stored. Inspection teams also went to a Scud missile facility that had been used to make bomb casings for chemical weapons before the end of the 1991 Gulf War.
Also Saturday, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, opening the Al-Merbad Poetry Festival in Baghdad, lashed out at the United States and Israel, saying they were bent on the destruction of Muslims.
U.S. jets, meanwhile, used "precision guided weapons" against three air-defense installations Saturday morning south and east of Baghdad after Iraqi military jets violated the southern no-fly zone, the U.S. Central Command said.
"They (the Iraqi warplanes) went south. I cannot begin to ascertain what their motivation was in doing so other than plainly violating the zone," Central Command spokesman Maj. Pete Mitchell told The Associated Press in Washington.
Also in the nation's capital, aides say President Bush may respond next week, probably in a formal speech, to Iraq's recently submitted 12,000 page declaration on its weapons programs.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Friday the administration's review of the declaration had not been completed, and Mr. Bush would speak only after he has received more information.
The State Department, meanwhile, dismissed the declaration as short on facts. "We know that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and has programs to create more," spokesman Richard Boucher said.
"What's not in the document may be as important as what is in the document," he said.
The inspection of the Scud complex, the government-owned al-Nasr company, 30 miles north of Baghdad, was a re-examination of the facility that also houses sophisticated machine tools that can, for example, help manufacture gas centrifuges. Such centrifuges are used to "enrich" uranium to bomb-grade level - a method favored by the Iraqis in their bomb program of the late 1980s.
The al-Tuwaitha nuclear facility 15 miles southeast of Baghdad, contains 1.8 tons of low-grade enriched uranium and several tons of natural and depleted uranium.
U.N. nuclear agency inspectors who visited the site Saturday have said the materials are of such low radioactivity that they could not easily be turned into weapons. The uranium has been in storage since the end of the Gulf War.
Iraqi officials said the nuclear facility had been destroyed twice - by the Israelis in 1981 during the Iran-Iraq war and by the U.S.-led coalition that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait during the Gulf War.
Recent satellite photos show four new buildings at the site suspected of housing new nuclear projects. The Iraqis, who deny have weapons of mass destruction or programs to build them, say the buildings are for environmental, medical and agricultural research.
In the first round of inspections in the 1990s, after Iraq's Guld War defeat, the United Nations destroyed tons of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons and dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
Recently published British and U.S. intelligence reports said new construction at old weapons sites and other activities suggest the Iraqis may have resumed making weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq's declaration to the United Nations does not account for a number of missing chemical and biological weapons and fails to explain purchases of equipment for a nuclear arms program, U.S. officials have said.
Russia, which submitted its own assessment of the Iraqi report, sent a delegation headed by Dmitry Rogozin, chairman of the international affairs committee of the Russian parliament, to Washington for talks.
After calling on Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman, another Russian official said there was no possibility Russia would provide troops to help in any conflict with Iraq but other possible forms of aid were an open question.
Britain, France and China also have seen the declaration and are assessing it. Early next week, copies will be given to the 10 other, nonpermanent, members of the U.N. Security Council, with sensitive sections deleted.
Next Thursday the council is to hear from Blix at a meeting that could launch consideration of using force to disarm Iraq.
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the Iraqi declaration "a bogus report" and said: "I don't know how you could put any credibility in it."
In other developments:
ElBaradei said his inspectors would need "something like a year" to prove or disprove Iraq's assertions that it no longer maintains a nuclear weapons program.
Iraq is not believed capable of using smallpox as a weapon, and probably has only small amounts of the virus, the officials said. Indeed, U.N. inspectors, before leaving Iraq in 1998, made little mention of smallpox as a threat from Iraq.
The dissidents, split along ethnic, religious and political lines, have been deadlocked over the composition and role of an interim administration and the question of who would keep the peace should Saddam's regime fall.