• Military

• WMD Menu                           

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

25 February 2003

UNMOVIC Preparing New Report on Iraq

(Blix reports on new information from Baghdad) (380)
By Judy Aita
Washington File Staff Writer
United Nations -- The senior advisors to U.N. weapons inspectors
February 25 ended two days of private meetings to prepare a report to
the Security Council on 30 specific unresolved disarmament issues in
Iraq.
The College of Commissioners of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and
Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) discussed the report chief weapons
inspector Hans Blix will send to the council. The written report will
be sent to the council on March 1 but no date has set been set for an
oral presentation in the council chambers.
Talking with reporters after the meeting, Blix said that he received
new information from Iraq including notification that Iraqi officials
found a bomb containing liquid at a biological weapons disposal site.
Blix said that the letters contained "some positive elements," but
said they need to be explored further.
"There is one letter in which they tell us they have found an R-400
bomb containing liquid in a site which is known to us at which they
did dispose of biological weapons before," he said.
Asked to comment on press reports that Saddam Hussein said he will not
destroy the Al Samoud 2 missiles which UNMOVIC said must be destroyed
by March 1, Blix said that he had no official communication from Iraq
on the issue.
One of the commissioners said that preparing the March 1 report, which
includes a historical analysis of Iraqi disarmament, is complicated.
The report is to include an analysis of the kinds of issues that
remained when inspections stopped in 1998, said John Wolf, the U.S.
commissioner.
"Because inspections haven't taken place in the period since 1998
until recently there's a large black whole which includes a number of
issues that would need to be considered and resolved in order to
achieve the kind of disarmament envisioned in (resolution) 1441," Wolf
said.
In Resolution 1441, the council asked Iraq to identify "fully,
completely, and currently all of its weapons of mass destruction and
to put that in the declaration on December 7," Wolf explained.
Iraq has failed to provide a complete declaration "so it's hard to
identify tasks that remain to be done," he said.
(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International
Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site:
http://usinfo.state.gov)