By Jonathan Wright

State Department Briefing

Washington - A delegation of U.S. congressional aides will visit Iraq despite State Department warnings it might be dangerous, partly because of the risk from attacks by U.S. warplanes, a member of the delegation said Thursday. The group will leave Friday, enter Iraq from Jordan and stay about five days to investigate the effect of U.N. sanctions on Iraq, Phyllis Bennis, a member of the group said. They canceled the trip last week after the State Department refused to validate their passports for Iraq. But in later discussions the department conceded they could make the visit legally if they did not enter Iraq on U.S. passports.

``They just didn't have a legal basis to prohibit representatives from the Congress from conducting an investigation,'' said Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. ``They don't have a leg to stand on and they know it.'' ``So despite their efforts, the Congress members and their aides realized they had the obligation and the right to go,'' she told Reuters.

State Department spokesman James Foley said of the trip: ''We think it's unsafe. We don't think it's a good idea.'' Another State Department official said the dangers included U.S. planes which regularly attack Iraqi air defenses and stray rounds from Iraq's anti-aircraft guns. ``We don't have an embassy so if anything happens, they're on their own,'' the official said.

U.S. officials say its attacks are in response to Iraq activating its radars and ``illuminating'' the planes. They say they expect an escalation in the confrontation over Iraqi skies, because Iraq is allegedly determined to shoot down a Western plane when the sanctions against Baghdad come up for debate in the U.N. Security Council. The State Department has said that the parts of Iraq controlled by the Baghdad government are not safe enough for U.S. citizens.``Safety is the only consideration in our determination whether to validate travel to Iraq. The increasing Iraqi provocations in the no-fly zones indicate that the areas of Iraq which (President) Saddam Hussein controls have become much too dangerous for American travelers,'' an official said.

The delegation of staffers in the U.S. House of Representatives includes aides to Vermont independent Bernie Sanders and three Democrats -- Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Danny Davis of Illinois and Earl Hilliard of Alabama. In a request sent to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger on Aug. 12, the members of Congress said the aim of the trip was to ``examine the effect of economic sanctions in Iraq on the civilian population, governmental policy, and U.S. economic and strategic interests''.

Iraq blames the sanctions for the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis through malnutrition and the collapse of medical services. A recent survey issued by UNICEF (the U.N. Children's Fund) found that child mortality rates have more than doubled in south and central Iraq since the sanctions began in 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait. But the United States says the Iraqi government is responsible because for years it refused to export oil under U.N. supervision, has not ordered the nutritional supplements the country needs and has stockpiled medicines in warehouses. Spokesman James Foley said this week that visiting Iraq on a U.S. passport which has not been validated ``may constitute a violation'' of U.S. law and may be punishable.