Any chance of finding out where this "ex-article" was published?

Denys

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From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Wirt Atmar
Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 3:39 PM
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Subject: OT: Oops!

Ex-weapons inspectors now say that the "unaccountables" they were
looking for
may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq
destroyed
banned chemical and biological weapons years ago:

======================================

(Sept. 7) - No weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq, nor
has
any solid new evidence for them turned up in Washington or London. But
what
about Baghdad's patchy bookkeeping - the gaps that led U.N. inspectors
to list
Iraqi nerve agents and bioweapons material as unaccounted for?

Ex-inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that the
"unaccountables'' may have been no more than paperwork glitches left
behind when Iraq
destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.

Some may represent miscounts, they say, and some may stem from Iraqi
underlings' efforts to satisfy the boss by exaggerating reports on arms
output in the
1980s.

"Under that sort of regime, you don't admit you got it wrong,'' said Ron
G.
Manley of Britain, a former chief U.N. adviser on chemical weapons.

His encounters with Iraqi scientists in the 1990s convinced him that at
times, when told to produce "X amount'' of a weapons agent, ``they wrote
down what
their superiors wanted to hear instead of the reality,'' said Manley,
who
noted that producing VX nerve agent, for example, is a difficult
process.

American ex-inspector Scott Ritter said he, too, was sure Baghdad's
"WMD''
accounts were at times overstated.

"There was so much pressure put on scientists to produce world-class
systems,
they would exaggerate their reports back to authorities,'' he said. As
inspectors scrutinized factories and interrogated Iraqi specialists,
"you suddenly
realized they weren't as good as they said they were.''

Ex-Marine officer Ritter, who sounded alarms about possible hidden Iraqi
weapons in the 1990s, stirred controversy the past two years by accusing
U.S.
officials of having failed to make a case for war on Iraq.

Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix, as he left his post this summer, became
more
open in discussing discrepancies.

After the mid-1990s, "hardly ever did (inspectors) find hidden
weapons,''
Blix reminded one audience. "What they found was bad accounting.

"It could be true they (Iraq) did destroy unilaterally in 1991 what they
hid.''

The discrepancies, disputed for years between U.N. inspectors and Iraqi
officials, may be of more interest now that U.S. weapons hunters are
failing to
find Iraqi chemical or biological arms.

Those weapons hunters, the Iraq Survey Group, say they still expect to
find
evidence of such programs. Their first interim report is expected in
mid-September. Through spokesman Kenneth Gerhart, they declined to
comment on the role
of the U.N. discrepancies list in their current work.

Some of the "bad'' accounting on the final U.N. list of unresolved
disarmament issues:

Although U.N. inspectors in the 1990s verified destruction of 760 tons
of
Iraqi chemical warfare agents, including 2.5 tons of VX nerve gas, Iraq
never
came up with convincing evidence for its claim that it had eliminated a
final,
additional 1.5 tons of VX.

A discrepancy between Iraqi documents left open the possibility
Baghdad's
military retained 6,526 more chemical-filled bombs from the 1980s than
inspectors
first thought.

The amount of biological growth medium obtained by Iraq suggested it was
capable of producing thousands of liters more anthrax than the 8,900
liters it
acknowledged.

Earlier this year, U.N. teams were working with Baghdad to pin down such
loose ends. The Iraqis had begun scientific soil sampling, for example,
to try to
confirm the amount of VX dumped long ago at a neutralization site, and
had
filed an initial report on March 17. Three days later, however, the U.S.
invasion
intervened.

Some such efforts had taken on a "for-the-record'' character since,
experts
note, any old VX or "wet'' anthrax, for example, would have degraded
into
ineffectiveness anyway.

The Iraqis never dried anthrax to make it last longer, says the former
head
of their biological weapons program. Nassir Al-Hindawi also reaffirms
that Iraq
never made more than 8,900 liters of anthrax. His postwar statements
have
added credibility at a time when any fear he felt of the Saddam Hussein
regime
would have subsided.

American officials at times used paperwork gaps to paint an ominous
picture.
President Bush last October spoke of "a massive stockpile of biological
weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing
millions.''

Some cases of fuzzy numbers may never be reconciled.

"Their ability to keep records on such things was pretty poor,'' Garth
Whitty, a former U.N. chemical arms inspector, said in London. "They
weren't
particularly good on inventories.''

Whitty spoke specifically of the inspectors' discovery last January, at
an
Iraqi ammunition dump, of a dozen empty chemical warheads for small
rockets -
munitions that should have been destroyed years earlier. The
circumstances made
clear the warheads had been overlooked, not concealed, Whitty said.

Manley cited another example of an inventory glitch: When his crews were
destroying supposedly empty Iraqi rockets in the early 1990s, one turned
out to be
loaded, blowing up, spewing sarin gas and injuring an Iraqi worker.

It was always a "fragile assumption'' to expect Iraq to provide a highly
detailed, fully consistent and well documented account of all its
weapons work,
said U.S. defense analyst Carl Conetta. No military can do that, he
wrote in a
report recapping the Iraq inspections.

A U.S. audit last year, for example, found the Pentagon had lost track
of
more than 1 million chemical-biological protective suits, said Conetta,
of the
Project on Defense Alternatives, a private think tank.

In perhaps the most striking example, U.S. government auditors found in
1994
that almost three tons of plutonium, enough for hundreds of nuclear
bombs, had
"vanished'' from U.S. stocks, because of discrepancies between "book
inventory'' and "physical inventory.''

=======================================

Wirt Atmar

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