|
U.N. Weapons Inspectors: Speech Not A Report
U.N. weapons inspectors will deliver their long-awaited assessment of Iraq's compliance over the past two months in speeches, not formal reports, and won't present samples taken during their search, the top inspector said Thursday. "It's an update, not a separate formal report but my speech will be written and available to the council," Hans Blix told The Associated Press after meeting his board of directors at U.N. headquarters. Blix, who heads the U.N Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, will brief the council on Monday along with his counterpart, Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Monday's report to the council will be crucial for the United States to any decision to press for military action against Iraq. Under U.N Security Council Resolution 1441, crafted by Washington, Iraq could be found in "material breach" â diplomatic language which could open the door to war â if it fails to cooperate with inspectors and disarm. Blix said his speech isn't written yet but that it will build on an assessment he presented to the council on Jan. 9 in which he criticized Iraq for failing to provide pro-active cooperation and fresh responses to hundreds of questions inspectors have on the fate of Iraq's former biological, chemical and nuclear programs. At the time Blix said inspectors hadn't found any "smoking gun," in Iraq. Since then, his teams have uncovered 16 warheads which he said Iraq didn't adequately account for in its 12,000-page arms declaration. Inspectors also uncovered some 3,000 pages of documents at the home of an Iraqi scientists, some of which Blix said should have been mentioned in the weapons declaration as well. Blix said Wednesday that tests were still being conducted on some of the warheads. None of the results however will be detailed in Blix's report to the council Monday. "This is far too technical a matter to bring up unless we find something sensational in a sample but I have not had such a report yet," Blix said. Why even bother? Posted by: Steve 2003-01-23 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=9512 |