Awesome. Stolen from panic in freeptown:
http://www.bakersfield.com/24hour/world/story/1761976p-9608981c.htmlU.N.: Arms expert warning had bad premise
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
Posted: Sunday October 24th, 2004, 10:26 AM
Last Updated: Sunday October 24th, 2004, 6:41 PM
(AP) - Arms hunter Charles Duelfer's report, in concluding Iraq might have resumed weapons-building "after sanctions were removed," left out the crucial fact that the U.N. Security Council had planned controls over Baghdad for years to come, U.N. officials say.
The council, led by the United States, had decreed that inspections and disarmament of Iraq were to be followed by tough, open-ended monitoring.
"It's been a little disturbing," said Demetrius Perricos, chief U.N. weapons inspector. "All the arguments say that when sanctions ended, Saddam Hussein would have had a free hand. By the council's own resolutions that wasn't so."
In his Oct. 6 report, CIA adviser Duelfer discredited President Bush's stated rationale for invading Iraq, saying his Iraq Survey Group found no weapons of mass destruction there. But he suggested Iraq might still have posed a threat.
Saddam "wanted to recreate Iraq's WMD capability - which was essentially destroyed in 1991 - after sanctions were removed," the report said, though it added that no such formal plan was uncovered.
This Duelfer finding became a new focus for the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney told one audience on Oct. 7, "As soon as the sanctions were lifted, (Saddam) had every intention of going back" to building weapons.
An academic expert on the Iraq inspections regime was among those disputing this, noting that lifting the U.N. embargo would not have opened that door. "This is not the case under Resolution 687 and later ones," said Yale University's James S. Sutterlin.
Years of Security Council resolutions preceding the 2003 U.S.-British invasion mandated that U.N. arms monitors would remain in Iraq once Baghdad's WMD programs were shut down - as Duelfer acknowledged they were in the 1990s. With unusual powers and the best technology, the monitors in this second stage would "prevent Iraq from developing new capabilities," said a blueprint for the Ongoing Monitoring and Verification (OMV) program.
Resolutions also stipulated that U.N. trade sanctions would not be lifted until the ongoing monitoring program was in place - and lifted then only for civilian goods.
The Security Council, where Washington has a veto, would decide how long to keep monitoring in place. Perricos said it was expected to last years. "You couldn't have disarmament and stop monitoring afterward," he told The Associated Press.
In 19 pages of "Key Findings," however, while raising the prospect of future threats, the Duelfer report ignores this plan to prevent them.
The CIA and Duelfer had no comment this week when asked why the role of Ongoing Monitoring and Verification went unacknowledged.
Official U.S. statements consistently disregarding this follow-up stage in Iraq arms control seem to have had an effect. "Most people don't understand that there was to be a permanent monitoring system in place to deter any return to WMD," said Jean Krasno of the City University of New York, co-author with Sutterlin of the 2003 book "The United Nations and Iraq."
In 2002, the Bush administration had demanded and voted for renewed U.N. inspections in Iraq. Then, in the lead-up to war, it publicly questioned their effectiveness, even as U.N. experts were conducting 700 inspections and finding no WMD.
In early 2003, the inspectors said they could formally certify Iraqi disarmament with several more months' work, after which long-term monitoring would take over. In preparation, they set up a northern office in Mosul and bought $5 million of high-tech surveillance cameras.
The U.S. attack then aborted the U.N. work.
The monitoring program would have covered hundreds of sites, from Iraq's nuclear complex to pesticide plants and breweries that might concoct chemical or biological weapons. It was originally envisioned as a $70-million-a-year operation with a staff of 350.
The inspectors would have been armed with sensors, sampling devices and remote video systems, and would have continued on-site inspections and interviews of ex-weapon scientists. They also would have monitored sites via aerial surveillance, had the right to inspect vehicles, and monitored Iraqi imports of civilian goods with potential military uses.
David Kay, Duelfer's predecessor as chief of the CIA weapons hunt, told AP that "OMV was discounted" because it was believed "that the Iraqis over time would find out how to manipulate the cameras, sampling methods, occasional visits."
The U.N. experts disputed this. Inspector spokesman Ewen Buchanan noted, for example, that the remote cameras could even broadcast to analysts that they've been tampered with. Besides, the arms-control specialists said, Kay was discounting a system that the world now knows disarmed Iraq without going to war.
"What happened in Iraq was that an international body of the U.N. went over, did the job and came out with results," Perricos said.
Ronald Cleminson, a veteran member of the U.N. commission that oversaw Iraq's disarmament, said he believes U.S. officials intentionally played down U.N. effectiveness and future monitoring plans. Otherwise, "they could not have set up a scenario with which one goes to war," said the retired Canadian intelligence officer.
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