AP: 'Unaccounted For' Iraqi Weapons May Be Bookkeeping Glitches

[papau]

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA5B3TJBKD.html

Sep 7, 2003

'Unaccounted For' Iraqi Weapons May Be Bookkeeping Glitches, Ex-Inspectors Say By Charles J. Hanley The Associated Press

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 U.N. inspectors to list Iraqi nerve agents and bioweapons material as unaccounted for? Ex-inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that the "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 U.N. 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. ...Chief U.N. 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." <snip>


Some of the "bad" accounting on the final U.N. list of unresolved disarmament issues: -Although U.N. 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 liters more anthrax than the 8,900 liters it acknowledged.Earlier this year, U.N. 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 neutralization site, and had filed an initial report on March 17. Three days later, however, the U.S. 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. <snip>

American officials at times used paperwork gaps to paint an ominous picture. President Bush last October spoke of "a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions." <snip>

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 U.S. defense analyst Carl Conetta. No military can do that, he wrote in a report recapping the Iraq inspections. A U.S. 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 Defense Alternatives, a private think tank. In perhaps the most striking example, U.S. government auditors found in 1994 that almost three tons of plutonium, enough for hundreds of nuclear bombs, had "vanished" from U.S. stocks, because of discrepancies between "book inventory" and "physical inventory."

AP-ES-09-07-03 1655EDT

This story can be found at: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGA5B3TJBKD.html

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