An International Atomic Energy Agency team investigating reports of looted radioactive materials from the Tuwaitha complex, the main site in Iraq’s former nuclear program, has accounted for most of the missing material, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said yesterday (see GSN, June 20).

“The initial report is that most of the material is accounted for, but I still have to wait for the final report," ElBaradei said.

The IAEA team is expected to report their findings to the agency’s Vienna headquarters next week, ElBaradei said.

“We have a team there right now — they will come back some time next week,” ElBaradei said.  “So next week I will be in a better position to give a report on the status of the nuclear material,” he added (Reuters, June 22).

WMD Search

Meanwhile, U.S. troops Saturday raided an abandoned community hall in Baghdad and recovered documents that may contain information about Iraq’s WMD efforts, according to the Associated Press.

Acting on an intelligence tip, U.S. troops early Saturday morning raided the hall, located in Baghdad’s Azamiyah district, according to the AP.  Inside, they found two large rooms that housed cryptograph machines, secure transmission devices and binders of documents.  Some of the documents, which were marked with the seal of the Mukhabarat secret intelligence service, included manifests for the delivery of communications equipment to the Iraqi nuclear agency, AP reported.  The documents have been given to senior intelligence analysts for review.

“It’s potentially significant,” said Capt. Ryan McWilliams, a battalion intelligence officer from the 1st Armored Division who examined the recovered documents at his unit’s headquarters (Jim Krane, Associated Press/Washington Times, June 22).

Some analysts have said that two trailers recovered in Iraq by coalition forces were not intended for use as mobile biological facilities, as the United States has claimed, but may have been intended to produce hydrogen for weather balloons.

A veteran intelligence official has said he believes the trailers were intended to produce hydrogen for weather balloons routinely used by Iraqi field artillery batteries.  The trailers were not equipped with sterilization equipment, such as autoclaves, that would be needed to produce biological agents, the official said. 

The trailers also were equipped with canvas tarpaulins on the sides that appeared to be designed to be lifted to allow excess heat to escape during hydrogen production, the official said.  The tarps would allow too much dust and other contaminants to enter the trailer if it was meant to produce biological agents, the official said.

“We didn’t find what we expected to find,” the official said (Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, June 21).

Blix Speculates on Iraqi Rationales for Noncooperation

In an interview last week with the Arms Control Association in Washington, retiring chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix speculated on the possible reasons why Iraq refused to fully cooperate with U.N. inspections prior to the war.

One possible reason is that Iraq saw a value to maintaining a type of ambiguity as to whether they possessed biological weapons, Blix said.

“Maybe they did not mind that people say, ‘Well maybe they have something’ — a deliberate ambiguity,” Blix said.  “It’s possible — the mystique of maybe having some biological weapons, maybe they’re playing around.  That is one possibility,” he said.

Blix could not explain, however, why Iraq would have sought to maintain such an ambiguity at the risk of war.

“Now, why should such a mystique — why should they pursue that until they are occupied?  That seems a little peculiar,” Blix said.  “Maybe by the force of its own logic or by miscalculation, brinksmanship,” he said.

Another possible factor could have been Iraqi pride, Blix said.  He noted that Iraqi officials were “legalistic” about complying only with the letter of U.N. disarmament resolutions and would not provide more cooperation than absolutely required.

“There must have been a strong element of pride, and that was why when I came here from the very outset, I said we are in Iraq for effective and correct inspections.  We are not there for the purpose of humiliating them, harassing them, or provoking them,” Blix said.

Blix also said that his consideration of Iraqi national pride might have been a factor in the improved relations the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) had with Iraqi officials than its predecessor, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM).

“There were many other elements too that we differed from UNSCOM, but this was one and I still think that pride might have been an element and, while we had lots of frictions and difficulties with them, in any case, we had I think a less difficult relation than UNSCOM had,” Blix said.  “We had, in particular, never any denial of access, and we had a good deal of cooperation when it came to setting up the infrastructure.  So did UNSCOM have cooperation, but they of course had many denials of access,” he added (Arms Control Association release, June 23). 

U.S. Intelligence Review

U.S. senators agreed to a compromise Friday on the scope of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s review of the Bush administration’s handling of prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq, according to the New York Times.

Under the compromise, Senate Republicans agreed to allow the committee to conduct a review of the intelligence, while Democrats agree not to label the procedure an “investigation.” 

In a joint statement released Friday, committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and top-ranked Democrat John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) announced a “joint commitment” to conduct a “thorough review” of intelligence.  Neither senator used the word “investigation” to describe the procedure.  The wording of the statement was carefully drafted by both senators, congressional aides said (James Risen, New York Times, June 21).

The committee is currently reviewing the “thousands and thousands of pages” of classified documents provided by the CIA, Rockefeller said on Fox News Sunday.  The review could last “for the next, I would assume, couple of months,” he said. 

So far, the Senate Intelligence Committee has held one hearing on the issue, with an additional three hearings planned, Agence France-Presse reported (Agence France-Presse, June 22).

Both Roberts and Rockefeller yesterday criticized Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) for saying that U.S. President George W. Bush misled the United States into going to war with Iraq.

“The senator is running for president,” Rockefeller said.  “And I think that Pat Roberts and I make a distinction between people who are running for president and therefore need to capture attention, and what we on the Intelligence Committee have to do, which is to get the facts and to get the intelligence, the counterintelligence and then try and decide,” he said.

Meanwhile, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, offered his own criticism yesterday of the White House’s handling of Iraq-related intelligence.

“We were misled,” Dean said on NBC’s Meet the Press.  “The question is, did the president do that on purpose or was he misled by his own intelligence people?” he added (Audrey Hudson, Washington Times, June 23).

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