BLIXKRIEG BOP:

INSPECTING IRAQ: A journalist in Baghdad reports on the state of weapons inspections in Iraq after U.N. arms experts reported that equipment was missing from a missile factory. (The Newshour, 12/02/02, PBS)

GWEN IFILL: Joining me from Baghdad is John Burns, foreign correspondent for the New York Times. This is his second reporting trip to Baghdad in the past couple of months. John, this is the fifth day of inspections. The President today said in a speech that the signs were not encouraging. What did you learn today?

JOHN BURNS: Well, the inspectors and the Iraqis have within in sort of a shakedown mode, getting used to each other. So far everything has been fairly routine, there has been some tension, a certain amount of mutual intrigue, but today things took a troubling turn at about the time that the President was speaking.

The inspectors who are looking at missile plants from one of the two U.N. inspection teams went to one of the principal missile sites in Iraq in Baghdad, they spent six hours there. And when they left, they issued a statement, which I have here, saying that on their visit to the al-Karamah General Company, as it's called, which has been developing the al-Samoud liquid propellant missile, which is a long-range missile, and development of the Scud missile used during the Iran-Iraq war, and here I quote, "a number of pieces of equipment tagged by the United Nations during the 1990s during the previous inspections were missing," and they conclude "none of these are currently present at the facility, it was claimed that some had been destroyed by the bombing of the site by the United States in 1998, some had been transferred to other sites."

Now this is a bit of a watershed, because while there has been equipment missing at one of the previous 17 sites visited, an animal vaccine plant that was a front for biological weapons development, the inspectors were told that that equipment had been moved to a new veterinary plant north of Baghdad, and they found it. It was a fermenter that had been used in the biological weapons program. What happened today was different. They evidently were not told where the equipment that's been moved has been taken. We were not told in their statement what that equipment was. But the tone of the message suggests that they're quite seriously troubled by it.

Who knew Hans Blix could actually be troubled by mere evidence of Iraqi attempts to evade inspections? Posted by Orrin Judd at December 2, 2002 10:34 PM