America Tore
Out 8000 Pages of Iraq Dossier
By
James Cusick and Felicity Arbuthnot
The United States edited out more than 8000 crucial pages of Iraq's
11,800-page dossier on weapons, before passing on a sanitized version
to the 10 non-permanent members of the United Nations security council.
The full extent of Washington's
complete control over who sees what in the crucial Iraqi dossier calls
into question the allegations made by US Secretary of State Colin Powell
that 'omissions' in the document constituted a 'material breach' of
the latest UN resolution on Iraq.
Last week, Secretary General
of the UN Kofi Annan accepted that it was 'unfortunate' that his organization
had allowed the US to take the only complete dossier and edit it. He
admitted 'the approach and style were wrong' and Norway, a member of
the security council, says it is being treated like a 'second-class
country'.
Although Powell called the
Iraqi dossier a 'catalogue of recycled information and flagrant omissions',
the non-permanent members of the security council will have no way of
testing the US claims for themselves. This will be crucial if the US
and the UK go back to the security council seeking explicit authorization
for war on Iraq if breaches of resolution 1441 are confirmed when the
weapons inspectors -- this weekend investigating 10 sites in Iraq, including
an oil refinery south of Baghdad -- deliver their report to the UN next
month.
A UN source in New York said:
'The questions being asked are valid. What did the US take out? And
if weapons inspectors are supposed to be checking against the dossier's
content, how can any future claim be verified. In effect the US is saying
trust us, and there are many who just will not.'
Current and former UN diplomats
are said to be livid at what some have called the 'theft' of the Iraqi
document by the US. Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant general secretary
of the UN and the UN's humanitarian co- ordinator in Iraq until 2000,
said: 'This is an outrageous attempt by the US to mislead.'
Although the five permanent
members of the security council -- the US, the UK, France, China and
Russia -- have had access to the complete version, there was agreement
that the US be allowed to edit the dossier on the ground that its contents
were 'risky' in terms of security on weapons proliferation.
Yesterday, US President George
W Bush announced that a planned trip to several African countries, scheduled
for January, had been canceled. As he gave the go-ahead to double the
current 50,000 US troops deployed in the Gulf by early January, he used
his weekly radio address to say that 'the men and women in the [US]
military, many of whom will spend Christmas at posts and bases far from
home' were the only thing that stood between 'Americans and grave danger'.
An equally pessimistic view
of the immediate future came from the Vatican. Pope John Paul II promised
the Catholic church would not cease to have its voice heard and would
offer prayers 'in the face of this horizon bathed in blood'.
Despite the prayers, the
US military isn't expecting peace. Yesterday, General Richard Myers,
chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, was asked if US forces were
ready if called upon immediately. General Myers simply said: 'You bet.'
The language coming from
Baghdad was equally gung ho. The Iraqi newspaper Babel, owned by Saddam
Hussein's eldest son Uday, likened US and UK political leaders to ruthless
Mongol conquerors of the past.
Published on
Sunday, December 22, 2002 by The Sunday Herald