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Open access to Iraqi sites
24/09/2002 22:53 - (SA)
Baghdad - Iraq will give UN arms inspectors "unfettered access" to suspected weapons sites and "wherever they want to go", including those listed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, presidential adviser Amer Saadi said on Tuesday.
"Inspectors will have unfettered access" after practical arrangements are made for their mission, which is expected to start in mid-October "if there is no interference from outside parties,"
he told a news conference.
Inspectors would be asked to give priority to sites mentioned by Blair, said Saadi in reaction to the British government's release Tuesday of a dossier on Iraq's arsenal.
He called the news conference in response to a dossier issued by Britain in its bid to show why it backs possible military action against Iraq.
"This is nonsense, absolute nonsense," Saadi said.
The dossier, issued on Tuesday, said Iraq could launch a weapon of mass destruction at 45 minutes' notice, but Baghdad dismissed the charge as lies. Iraq says it has no weapons of mass destruction.
After Baghdad's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War, UN inspectors spent seven years in Iraq seeking out and destroying weapon stocks, but the United States and Britain say they did not find them all and that Iraq has now acquired new ones.
CIA echoes Blair
Meanwhile in Warsaw, Poland, a top CIA's official briefed Nato defence ministers on Tuesday on Iraq, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and echoed the conclusions of a British report, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.
"If you're all on the same sheet of music, why you tend to sing the same song," he told reporters after the classified briefing by deputy CIA director John McLaughlin.
The 55-page white paper released by Britain charged that the
regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is producing chemical and biological weapons and trying to acquire uranium for a nuclear weapon.
US voters uneasy about Iraq war
Voters in South Dakota and Minnesota, where the issue of Iraq has cropped up in crucial senate races, echo national polls showing a majority of Americans back President George W Bush's effort to oust Saddam. The issue has flared up in South Dakota and Minnesota, where incumbent senate Democrats face tough Republican challenges.
But in more than two dozen interviews in both states, they also voiced deep unease over the quick pace of the Iraq debate in Washington and the lack of international support for US military action.
Glen Walters, the South Dakota commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said state veterans were split on a move against Iraq, particularly without international support.
"I'm very worried about it," he said. A preemptive strike against Iraq, without an act of aggression by Baghdad, would be "taking a step that our government has never taken before. I don't know if it's right."
Democratic Senator Tim Johnson's voted against the Gulf War resolution in 1991 and decided to join other lawmakers in a lawsuit to force then-President George Bush, the current president's father, to seek congressional approval for war.
- Reuters and Sapa-AFP
- SAPA
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