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Iraqi says UN report on weapons is unfair
( 2003-01-29 09:36 ) (7 )

A senior Iraqi official insisted Tuesday that Iraq holds no banned weapons and said that a report by UN inspectors complaining of insufficient cooperation did not represent the facts fairly or proportionally.

The United Nations inspection agency reported, meanwhile, that two more Iraqi scientists had refused to submit to UN interviews without witnesses, making a total of 16 who have rejected private questioning.

In the first official comment in Baghdad on the inspectors' report Monday to the UN Security Council, an adviser to President Saddam Hussein, Lieutenant General Amer Rashid, rejected suggestions that Iraq has not been cooperating with the arms inspections.

"We are cooperating with all our capacity and if there is a demand for additional cooperation in some issue, here or there, we will do it," he said. He also repeated Iraq's position that it possesses no weapons of mass destruction.

Rashid complained that the assessment given to the Security Council by the UN's chief monitors, Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, failed to note that their inspections did not support U.S. and British allegations of forbidden weapons work at specific sites.

"There was not proportionate presentation of the facts," Rashid said. "We see, for example, some facts amplified and magnified on what are called problems." This, he said, creates a "somewhat negative" impact. Rashid said that American and British intelligence reports last year spotlighted Iraqi sites that they contended might be conducting work on forbidden chemical, biological or nuclear arms. Inspections over the past two months have repeatedly covered these sites and no major violations have been reported.

Among the shortcomings cited by Blix was Iraq's refusal so far to agree to flights by American U-2 spy planes over its territory in support of the inspection mission. Rashid said that Iraq had not ruled out the use of the U.S. spy planes but had asked for security guarantees, including the suspension of U.S. and British air patrols over the northern and southern "no flight" zones during such flights. On the subject of interviews, Rashid said that Baghdad officials had encouraged - under a Jan. 20 agreement with Blix and ElBaradei - Iraqi scientists to submit to unmonitored questioning. But "all of them," he said, had demanded to have an Iraqi present as a witness.

Paul Wolfowitz, the American deputy defense secretary, has accused the Iraqi government of threatening scientists with death if they speak to inspectors without an Iraqi official present.

UN inspectors in Iraq, meanwhile, continued their hunt for evidence of biological, nuclear and chemical arms, visiting at least seven sites Tuesday, including a munitions depot where they discovered empty chemical warheads earlier this month.

The inspectors visited a military depot south of Baghdad where they discovered 12 empty chemical warheads Jan. 16. They returned to the depot last week to tag weapons there; it was not immediately known why they went there again Tuesday.

Elsewhere, Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that Iraq had no plans to attack targets inside the United States in the event of war.

Nonetheless, Aziz warned that Iraqis would vigorously defend themselves if the Americans launch a war. "I would say that if the Americans try to invade Iraq, they will be fought courageously and effectively and they will have a great number of casualties," he said. Asked whether Saddam's government would strike against other countries, presumably Israel, Aziz replied: "No. We will fight within our territory."

Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles, all with conventional warheads, at Israeli cities in the 1991 Gulf War.

But Aziz hinted that those restrictions would not apply to Kuwait, which Iraq invaded in 1990. The United States is assembling a large force in the neighboring emirate for a possible war.

"American troops are in Kuwait and preparing themselves to attack Iraq," Aziz said. "If there will be an attack from Kuwait, I cannot say that we will not retaliate."