UNITED NATIONS, Dec 9: After an intense lobbying campaign, the United States received an early and uncut copy of Iraq’s weapons declaration and whisked it to Washington for analysis, diplomats and US officials said on Monday.
“It’s already in Washington,” a Bush administration official said.
The United States still has the lone copy of the report and will make duplicates for distribution to the other four permanent UN security council members, Russian envoy Gennady Gatilov said.
Diplomats said this was done because Washington had the best photocopying capabilities.
In Iraq, weapons inspections moved up a gear with the arrival of 25 more experts during the day.
The reinforcements are the first of many planned in coming days, as the United Nations moves to fan out across the country to test Iraq’s 12,000-page denial of banned weapons development, which was delivered by the Sunday deadline.
The surprise decision to quickly turn over copies of the full report to the five permanent council members overrode what the 15-member body had discussed on Friday.
At that time, the council had decided to leave the report in the hands of UN arms inspectors until it was screened for possible nuclear secrets — a process expected to take days. All five permanent Council members are avowed nuclear powers.
The 10 non-permanent members will see a purged version of the document once the arms inspectors have gone through the report and removed sensitive material, such as possible instructions on how to make a bomb.—Reuters/AFP
