Weapons Report: Debriefer

RAY SUAREZ:

Baghdad's arms declaration–12,000 pages packed into a suitcase and boxes– arrived at the United Nations Sunday. Under last month's Security Council resolution, Iraq had to account for all nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons by this weekend. Today U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said assessing and translating the bulky report would take time. Many parts are in Arabic.

KOFI ANNAN:

I think the documents have just arrived, and as you all know, the inspectors will have to review them, analyze them, and report to the Council, and I think that's going to take a while.

RAY SUAREZ:

All five permanent members of the Security Council will get copies of the document. As a new round of inspectors arrived, officials in Iraq insisted the arms declaration would show no weapons of mass destruction and no plans underway to produce them. General Amir al-Saadi, a top adviser to President Saddam Hussein, challenged the U.S. to present evidence to the contrary to the International Atomic Energy agency, or IAEA.

REPORTER:

Do you think this declaration will satisfy the United States and Britain? I mean, I'm sure you think it should satisfy them, but do you actually think it will?

GENERAL AMIR AL-SAADI:

Well, we hope that it will satisfy, because it is currently as accurate as they have asked for, and comprehensive, truthful– everything. If they anything to the contrary, let them forthwith come up with it, give it to the IAEA, give it to UNMOVIC. They are here. They could check it. Why play this game?

RAY SUAREZ:

But al-Saadi also confirmed to reporters that Iraq had tried to acquire a nuclear bomb just before the Persian Gulf War. He told them, "We haven't reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it. If you follow the documents we've given, there is no guarantee that you would succeed. It's for others to judge how close we were." The Bush administration held off on any judgments about the arms declaration today, other than to say it wanted to analyze the data.

RAY SUAREZ:

Joining me from Baghdad is John Burns, senior foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

John, was General al Saadi's public pronouncement the first time any Iraqi official has ever conceded that the country had an active nuclear program?

JOHN BURNS:

They had conceded that to the International Atomic Energy Association in the declarations that they've been obliged to make in the past, some years ago. What was remarkable about General Sadi's presentation yesterday was it was the first time that an Iraqi official consciously was talking to a worldwide television audience, spoke in considerable detail about that program and strongly implied that in the weeks before the Gulf War began in January 1991, Iraq was within striking distance of having at least one atomic bomb.

RAY SUAREZ:

When you say "within striking distance" and "close to the Gulf War," Iraq maintains that that program didn't survive the war?

JOHN BURNS:

They did, and they're still maintaining that it didn't survive the war. And, of course, as you know, there are serious questions being raised about that, but General Sadi would know the truth if anybody knew it, because through the 1990s he was the most important Iraqi official on the weapons issue. He ran the military industrial commission of Iraq, which controlled all the secret weapons programs.

RAY SUAREZ:

Did he have anything to say in that same public statement about the state of the country's biological or chemical weapons program?

JOHN BURNS:

Yes, their position is that all of these programs, as you know, have been disbanded. The international inspection teams have said that these are open issues because there were agents and precursors, scientific terms, we would say resources and materials, for those programs, hundreds of tons in some cases, thousands of tons, in one case that I can think of, that went missing. And the only hint that General Sadi gave to us as to what had happened to these materials was he said that they had been destroyed, and he said that in one instance when they were destroyed, and he said before the inspectors first came in in 1991, no adequate records were kept and that therefore in their declaration now under study in New York and Vienna, they have not been able to account for these missing materials because they themselves have lost the records. It will be, of course, up to Hans Blix and President Bush and others to decide if they believe that.

RAY SUAREZ:

So Iraq is saying basically that it did its work of destruction so well that there's no trace of it left?

JOHN BURNS:

That's correct. The position is absolutely unambiguous on every aspect of this. We have no banned weapons of mass destruction. We have no undeclared secret programs. If you think of it in terms of gambling, the table is now set. The players are at the table, the stakes have been declared, and Iraq is sitting there, and they're in effect calling President Bush's hand. They're saying, "We've got zero. You say otherwise, you prove it."

RAY SUAREZ:

Meanwhile, the inspections have gone on even as these disclosures were being made?

JOHN BURNS:

They have indeed. Today they were out again in somewhat greater numbers than before. There have now been three groups arrive. They're building up towards 100 inspectors by Christmas. And today, interestingly, they went back to the al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex. This is the place where most of the work on the atomic bomb was done. It's about 20 miles southeast of Baghdad, an absolutely enormous installation, the size of many American cities. You can drive along one flank of it for about five miles. The inspectors went back there today, five teams. This is interesting because as you may recall when the inspections began, 12 days ago or so, they only had two teams a day. Now they have enough people to send five teams of inspectors to a single site, so the pace is definitely picking up.

RAY SUAREZ:

And are the inspectors able to make use of materials, of evidence that was gathered during the '90s and, in effect, compare it with what they see today?

JOHN BURNS:

They are. They're looking for any signs of any changes, and we know that al-Tuwaitha, one of the things… the nuclear installation… one of the things that has attracted the attention of American intelligence agencies was that there has been new construction at that site. They were looking at some of that construction today. They were there with Geiger counters and other scientific instruments, they were taking swab samples, all of this to determine if in fact there's any evidence that any work has taken place since the inspectors were last here in 1998. Again, the position of the government of Iraq is no work of any kind that relates to weapons.

RAY SUAREZ:

Along with al-Tuwaitha, the wires are reporting they went to a place called Fallujah which produces chlorine and hydrochloric acid. Some of these substances can be used in weapons, it said, but they certainly have a lot of civilian uses as well. Does it end up coming down to a sort of "he said, he said" standoff?

JOHN BURNS:

It does indeed. In fact, General al Sadi– who is President Saddam Hussein's personal advisor now on weapons, so he's as close to the center of things as you can get– yesterday described the Resolution 1441 mandating these inspections and the terms of it as ridiculous. He said that the 900 sites that the inspectors are known to be interested in, the vast majority of what they call dual-use installations, civilian enterprises which include, so he says, refineries, canneries, dairies, and other such installations; some of them being inspected, he said, because the only way that they meet these standards is that they absorb more than ten megawatts of power. He said — that was one of his complaints, the enormous amount of work that's being required by the Iraqis to detail all these sites. And his other complaint was that there is absolutely no room for error here. And he said the resolution is draconian, we are not allowed even a single mistake, and of course, we know that to be true because President Bush has said so.

RAY SUAREZ:

John Burns in Baghdad, thanks for joining us.

JOHN BURNS:

It's a pleasure.