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UN finds Iraqi missile designed to strew chemical bomblets
United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq have discovered a new variety of rocket apparently configured to spread bomblets filled with chemical or biological agents over large areas, United States officials say. The reconfigured rocket warheads appear to be cobbled together from Iraq's stockpiles of imported or home-built weapons, some of which Iraq has already used with both conventional and chemical warheads. Iraq insists it has destroyed all its old chemical warheads, a claim the inspectors have not verified. A United States official said that Iraq at first told inspectors the rocket was designed as a conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical weapon. A few days later, he said, the Iraqis conceded some rockets might have been configured as chemical weapons. The distinctive appearance of the rockets' cluster munitions - heavy metal balls with holes in them - suggested their use as a way to disperse chemical or biological weapons, the official said. "If you take the kinds of fuses we know they have, and you screw them in there, when these things come out from the main frame and they explode inward, chemical agents come out," he said. "These can be used for biological weapons, too."US officials said that the discovery, buttressed by information contained in a 173-page report by the inspection team, detailing the history of Iraqi weapons programs and the United Nations' attempts to enforce compliance with its disarmament resolutions over the last 12 years, showed that Iraq could not be trusted to co-operate with the inspectors.The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said on Sunday that the chief inspector for chemical and biological weapons, Hans Blix, should have made more of the evidence in that report when he appeared before the Security Council last week. Blix buried this in the same report that mentioned the drone aircraft. Guess he was hoping that nobody read it. "When you look at page after page of what the Iraqis have done over the years to hide, to deceive, to cheat, to keep information away from the inspectors, to change facts to fit the latest issue, and once they put that set of facts before you, when you find those facts are false, they come up with a new set of facts - it's a constant pattern," he said. You see the same pattern with Blixie's reports. Posted by: Steve 2003-03-10 |
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