December 22, 2002
Iraq said on Sunday it was ready to answer any questions raised by the United States and Britain on its arms declaration, and would allow the CIA to come and identify suspect sites for weapons inspectors.
``We are ready to deal with each of those questions if you ask us,'' said presidential adviser Amir al-Saadi. ``We do not even have any objections if the CIA sent somebody with the inspectors to show them the suspected sites,'' he told a news conference in Baghdad. He said chief weapons inspector Hans Blix had sent Iraq a ``formal request to provide a list of certain scientists and we are going to provide that list before the end of this year.''
Saadi addressed specific questions raised by Washington and London, allies which found that Baghdad's declaration fell short of meeting the U.N. resolution to disarm Iraq. Saadi said U.S. questions over whether Iraq had disclosed its efforts to obtain uranium from South Africa or Niger had already been discussed in talks with Blix and nuclear weapons chief Mohamed ElBaradei.
Saadi said he told the two inspectors last month Iraq had tried to obtain uranium oxide, not uranium, from Niger in the mid-1980s but had never tried to obtain any such material from South Africa. ``There were no new procurements or attempts to procure,'' he said. ``That was a question formally asked across the table and formally answered by us.''
On Washington's question of whether Iraq had tried to produce the deadly nerve agent VX, Saadi said U.S. concerns were based on information from an earlier U.N. inspection team in the early 1990's, which Iraq said manipulated evidence.
Saadi said Iraq made an unsuccessful attempt in April 1990 to produce a quantity of VX but the material degraded rapidly and attempts to produce it were abandoned. ``No production was achieved, no VX was produced,'' he said. The adviser said samples purported to be VX taken from Iraqi sites by members of UNSCOM, headed by Richard Butler, were sent to the United States for analysis. ``They were sealed...but we found later they had been opened,'' Saadi said.
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