Repeated inspections but no hard evidence: To Iraqis, site visits are a pointless charade

By Robert Collier, San Francisco Chronicle, Monday 30 December 2002

Baghdad—Outside a huge, hulking building in an industrial suburb of Baghdad, long white metal cylinders shaped like ballistic missiles sit in rows, glinting ominously in the sunshine.

To American intelligence experts viewing by satellites miles overhead, the al-Nasr factory complex must look like a hiding place for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's reputed weapons of mass destruction.

But when U.N. inspectors swarmed over the site, they found that the cylinders outside the building, and under construction inside, appeared to be exactly what the Iraqis said they were—large pressured chambers in storage tanks for the nation's petroleum and petrochemical industries. Tension flared when inspectors and their Iraqi counterparts hurried from the main factory to a nearby office building and returned with a nervous Iraqi clutching a handful of keys—a sign they had found a suspicious door that wouldn't open.

Would the Iraqis find the right key? If not, would a locked storeroom be considered Iraqi stonewalling and thus another piece of evidence in the case for war? If the key were found, would the inspectors find a secret stash of documents or weapons behind the locked door?

The inspectors soon emerged again, chatting amiably with the Iraqis, then got into their cars and left. The key had been found, the door opened, and nothing found amiss. Nor was anything else wrong in the factory during the three-hour visit Friday.

NO HARD EVIDENCE

Every day, as U.N. weapons inspectors fan out across Iraq, the news is the same—no hard evidence of the chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, or the long-range missiles, that the Bush administration insists Hussein's regime possesses.

To Iraq, the result is proof the American charges are false and that there is no cause for war. We are innocent of the U.S. charges, and the United Nations must be a fair court, said Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin, director of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate.

To the United States, the inspections process has failed to provide hard evidence refuting U.S. and U.N. suspicions that Iraq has unaccounted-for stocks of anthrax, botulinum toxin, mustard gas, sarin gas and VX nerve gas.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says repeatedly, citing as proof Iraq's record of lying on its weapons declarations in past years.

Put simply, the problem boils down to this: Is Saddam Hussein's regime innocent until proven guilty, or guilty until proven innocent?

U.N. REVIEW COMING UP

These competing presumptions will play a central role when the U.N. Security Council in late January evaluates the weapons inspections process and determines whether to authorize an invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies.

Yet as the inspection of al-Nasr demonstrated, the U.N. inspections may be growing redundant to the point of near-irrelevance. Friday's visit was the third time in the past month that inspectors have gone to al-Nasr. In 1998, the factory was attacked by U.S. missiles, and from 1996 to 1998, it was visited repeatedly by U.N. inspectors. Not once was incriminating evidence found.

Overall, the inspectors have made 202 site visits since they resumed work in November after a four-year hiatus. It's unclear how many of this year's inspections were repeat visits.

To the Iraqis it's all a pointless charade.

We have never made missiles, said Ayad Hussein, deputy manager of the al- Nasr complex, as he led reporters through the cavernous building after the U.N.

inspectors left. They have bombed this plant, they have inspected it again and again. Why do they need to keep suspecting us? Anger rose briefly in his voice. Then he shrugged and said blankly, Fine, let them come again and again.

REPETITIVE INSPECTIONS

To explain the repetitions, U.N. spokesmen in Baghdad admit they have largely exhausted their list of possible weapons sites and must make repeat visits to stay busy. They have asked the United States to provide intelligence to help identify new sites.

Although the Bush administration recently said it would share some secrets with the United Nations, it appears to have turned over little so far. Some administration officials reportedly oppose such disclosures on grounds that inspectors might leak the information to the Iraqis and that intelligence should be saved for U.S. attack planners during wartime.

INTERVIEWING SCIENTISTS

The other leading chance for new, incriminating information could come from interviews with Iraqi weapons experts. On Saturday, Iraq handed over a list of more than 500 scientists who had worked on the country's chemical, biological and nuclear programs.

The United States is pressuring the United Nations to demand that the scientists leave the country, but chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N. nuclear weapons agency, are resisting the suggestion. Although neither U.N. official has made fully clear the reasons for reluctance, some experts in the U.S. have said they fear the U.N. mission's autonomy could be called into question because CIA agents might be permitted to interview the scientists—and presumably offer them bribes to defect.

In spite of that controversy, the search for Hussein's presumed hidden weapons grinds on.

While the number of U.N. inspectors has grown to about 110, and they are covering ever-wider areas of the country, their work is drawing in progressively smaller and smaller crowds of foreign journalists, who gather at U.N. headquarters every morning to follow them as they drive off to unannounced locations.

PACE SLOWED DOWN

When the visits started in November, the inspectors were tailed by hundreds of reporters and television crews in high-speed car chases through Baghdad—causing several bloody traffic accidents in the process. Now, only a half- dozen cameras make the morning stakeout, and the pace is slower.

Making sense of it all is difficult even for seasoned observers in Baghdad. U.N. inspectors are generally tight-lipped about their work and refer most questions to their superiors in New York. Diplomats view the Iraqi government's statements with extreme skepticism.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's apparent march toward war makes anything that occurs in Iraq seem of lesser importance.

What's happening here is an almost complete lack of information, said a European diplomat in Baghdad, who asked to remain unidentified because of what he termed the extreme sensitivity of the Iraqi government, and because his own government tightly controls its policy statements on the issue.

If you want to find out what's going on, go to New York or Washington. That's where the news is. Here, among diplomats in Iraq, we're all in the dark.