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BAGHDAD, Dec 5: Iraq on Wednesday branded UN arms experts spies and said it was mulling the idea of calling for “independent experts” to monitor the work of the inspectors.
Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan was quoted on Thursday as saying that the inspectors were “spies in the pay of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Mossad”, who were laying the groundwork for a US-led invasion.
Talking to a delegation of visiting Egyptian MPs, the Iraqi vice president said “the inspectors did not come to satisfy themselves that Iraq does not possess weapons of mass destruction, but came to provide the best conditions and the most precise intelligence for the attack to come”.
“We think that the work of the (UN) inspection team must be under the observation of all media,” said Ramadan through an interpreter to BBC and Middle East journalists in Baghdad.
“The inspection team themselves prevent journalists from going inside inspection sites,” he said.
“Therefore, we are now thinking of calling for some independent experts to check, by themselves, inside inspected sites after the team has left,” he added.
Asked if war was inevitable, Ramadan said American policy for dealing with Iraq was “very childish,” and that the Bush administration and US media were “kind of beating war drums.”
“This gives you the impression that the Americans are looking for aggression,” said Ramadan through the interpreter. “By the American logic, war is inevitable.”
WHITE HOUSE: The White House said it would wait to see the “huge document” which Iraqi officials have said they will deliver on Saturday, although a spokesman made clear Washington rejected Baghdad’s continued assertion it had no prohibited weapons.
The UN arms experts took a two-day break from inspections on account of Eid as the honeymoon in relations with Baghdad which had marked their first week back in Iraq came to an abrupt end.
Ramadan’s attack on the UN experts was reminiscent of those regularly levelled against the previous inspections mission withdrawn from Iraq on the eve of the last major US-British bombing blitz in Dec 1998, as US officials were quick to note.
“This is another indication that the regime has not made a strategic decision to change its behaviour,” said a senior administration official.
“It’s reminiscent of the baseless charges levelled at UN inspectors during Iraq’s decade of deception and defiance” after the 1991 invasion, he said. The United Nations did, however, admit at the time that Iraq did have a case.
The change in tone from Baghdad followed the announcement by its top liaison with UN inspectors that it would own up to no “prohibited activities” in the weapons declaration it is required to make to the United Nations by Sunday.
General Hossam Mohammad Amin vowed Iraq would submit a “huge declaration”, but reiterated that Baghdad had none of the weapons of mass destruction that Washington has said it must own up to or risk military action for “lying”.
“It will be a huge declaration containing new elements, containing new sites, new activities conducted during the absence of inspectors,” said Amin, who heads Iraq’s national monitoring directorate.
“It covers biological, chemical, missiles, nuclear but there are no prohibited activities,” he told a news conference on Wednesday evening. “We have absolutely no weapons of mass destruction.”—AFP
