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| U.N. Weapons Inspectors: Speech Not A Report |
| 2003-01-23 |
| 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" — diplomatic language which could open the door to war — 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 |
| #5 Russel: Accuracy and completeness are also factors when auditors go over a set of books. When the books don't "balance", the cause is usually deficiencies in one or both. I still feel my analogy stands, although different terms may be used. The model for disarmament, with examples, was given in Condolezza Rice's speech above. Iraq emulates none of them. The resolution demanded a report, and they knew that the report was due and when it was due. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2003-01-23 20:16:20 |
| #4 Ptah, There are two distinct elements to both UNMOVIC and IAEA verification. The first is "accuracy" (is inventory A at location X?) the second is "completeness" (are there undeclared inventories?). Both accuracy and completeness have to be addressed before a conclusion can be drawn by either organisation. |
| Posted by: Russell 2003-01-23 16:40:14 |
| #3 "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. This is like finding vacated medfly pupa cocoons and medfly shit all over without seeing an actual medly and insisting that there's no evidence of a medfly infestation. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2003-01-23 14:42:07 |
| #2 Slowly dawning on Blix that his little show is over, |
| Posted by: john 2003-01-23 14:27:00 |
| #1 A question: Can Blix also be found in material breach of the resolution, in that he is not doing what the resolution is telling him what he's supposed to do? At first, the 16 warheads DID look, even to me, to be a small thing. However, the point of the inspectors is to serve as an auditing group: The declaration said there no stuff at locations X, Y, and Z, so the inspectors are verifying that there are no weapons at X, Y, and Z. If there are weapons at W, and the report doesn't say ANYTHING about W, then there's nothing to verify. The original 12 warheads are analogous to a firm's books not balancing, to the order of 12 cents. 12 cents may be small change to us, but it upsets financial auditors to no end, since that's the trigger for a required search for any evidence that the the books were cooked. Financial software goes through all kinds of mathematical contortions to properly round, handle, and account for fractional pennies. We're talking about a DICTATORSHIP here, people. Would they knowingly leave their controls on their own WMD in such a bad shape that they are risking that their stuff would be pinched by their internal opposition and used against them?. Forget the yammering that they're a third world country: We're talking about Saddam being potentially attacked by WMD stolen from his own arsenal. You can bet your bottom dollar that ensuring personal survival is item #1 on every dictator's to-do list. |
| Posted by: Ptah 2003-01-23 14:14:29 |