Iraq Vows To Tell All

Iraq has promised to meet a Dec. 8 deadline for declaring whether it still holds any weapons of mass destruction, the head of the U.N. nuclear control agency said Tuesday.

Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iraqi officials made the commitment during talks Monday night with chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and other team members.

"Iraq is committed to declare all it possesses regarding weapons of mass destruction, if it still has any of them … and will also declare all of its activities in the chemical, biological and nuclear fields, even those of civilian use," ElBaradei told Associated Press Television News and Egypt's Nile television.

"We hope that this oral commitment will be translated into fact when we begin inspections next week," he added.

On Tuesday, Blix and team members visited U.N. officials and diplomats in Baghdad on Tuesday, and were scheduled to meet with Iraqi officials later in the day to discuss restarting searches.

U.N. officials said the talks with Iraqi officials centered on the timetable for inspections, including a requirement for Baghdad to submit a detailed report on its weapons programs next month.

Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the U.N. nuclear controls agency, said the Iraqis expressed concern about meeting the reporting deadlines. However, Gwozdecky said the talks were "going well."

A government newspaper, Al-Iraq, insisted that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction and "the U.S. government wants to attack Iraq under the pretext of the banned weapons and their alleged danger."

Meeting the Dec. 8 deadline is one of the key conditions laid down in the new Security Council resolution, which authorized U.N. inspectors to return to Iraq after a four-year hiatus.

The return of the inspectors is widely seen as President Saddam Hussein's last chance to avoid a devastating war with the United States. President Bush has warned Hussein that failure to cooperate with the inspectors will bring on an American attack.

The new resolution also gives inspectors the explicit authority "to inspect any sites and buildings, including immediate, unimpeded, unconditional, and unrestricted access to presidential sites equal to that at all other sites."

Even mosques are not off limits, Blix said before leaving for Baghdad. Blix has said preliminary inspections could begin as early as Nov. 27.

Iraqi officials, though pledging cooperation, have made clear their hostility toward the resolution.

The official Iraqi News Agency quoted Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan as saying Iraq accepted the resolution "despite its injustice" to prove it is free of weapons of mass destruction.

The inspectors must verify that Iraq is free of proscribed weapons before the Security Council will lift strict economic sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. Iraq claims those sanctions have led to thousands of civilian deaths.

When the full inspection teams do arrive they'll have a good idea where to start looking, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips.

Intelligence reports refer to new activity at several sites including one at Osirak, near Baghdad, where nuclear research was being done before the site was destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War.

On Monday, allied warplanes bombed Iraqi air defense systems in the northern no-fly zone after the U.S. military said the jets were fired on during routine patrols. Iraq considers such patrols a violation of its sovereignty and frequently shoots at them.

The White House says Iraqi acts against U.S. jets are a violation of the new U.N. resolution, but since the Security Council has never explicitly authorized the no-fly zones, it's not clear other Council members would treat it as a violation.

Meanwhile, an anti-war group said it would take the British government to court unless it promised not to attack Iraq without explicit United Nations approval.

Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament said it had sent a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair threatening to go to court is Britain attempts to use force against Iraq without a new resolution from the U.N. Security Council.