WMD: It was bad bookkeeping

2003-09-07 13:08

New York - 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 UN inspectors to list Iraqi nerve agents and bioweapons material as unaccounted for?

Ex-inspectors now say, five months after the US invasion, that the notorious "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 UN 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 scrutinised factories and interrogated Iraqi specialists, "you suddenly realised 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 US officials of having failed to make a case for war on Iraq.

Chief UN 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."

'Failing to find Iraqi WMD'

The discrepancies, disputed for years between UN inspectors and Iraqi officials, may be of more interest now that US 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 spokesperson Kenneth Gerhart, they declined to comment on the role of the UN discrepancies list in their current work.

Some of the "bad" accounting on the final UN list of unresolved disarmament issues:

-Although UN 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 litres more anthrax than the 8 900 litres it acknowledged.

Earlier this year, UN 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 neutralisation site, and had filed an initial report on March 17. Three days later, however, the US 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 litres 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 George W 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.

Inventories

"Their ability to keep records on such things was pretty poor," Garth Whitty, a former UN 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 US defence analyst Carl Conetta. No military can do that, he wrote in a report recapping the Iraq inspections.

A US 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 Defence Alternatives, a private think tank.

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

- SAPA