U.S. Is First to Get a Copy of Report on Iraqi Weapons
By JULIA PRESTON
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 9 - The United States has taken possession of a copy of Iraq's declaration of its weapons programs, after persuading the four other permanent members of the Security Council to support it in insisting on seeing the document immediately, American officials said today.
In doing so, Washington reversed a decision that all 15 Council nations made on Friday to hold off on receiving the declaration until it had been screened by United Nations experts for information that could be used to make a nuclear weapon. That process would have taken 7 to 10 days, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, decided late Friday that they did not want to wait, United States officials said....
Today the Bush administration, citing an Iraqi general's comments over the weekend about his country's past arms programs, argued that President Saddam Hussein had not given up his quest to build a nuclear weapon.
The declaration was given to the United States by Hans Blix, a chief weapons inspector, at the behest of the Colombian ambassador to the United Nations, Alfonso Valdivieso, who is serving as Council president.
Secretary Powell called Colombian officials over the weekend to secure their cooperation with the United States' plan, American officials said. Secretary Powell returned Wednesday night from a trip to Colombia, where he announced major increases in American military aid.
A Colombian diplomat acknowledged today that his government had made a "political decision" to accede to Washington's plan and wave aside objections from some of the nonpermanent Council members, most notably Syria.
This morning, American diplomats here sent the declaration to Washington, where, they said, copies of the mountains of paper and CD-ROM's were being prepared for the four other permanent members. The diplomats said copies would be distributed through secure channels by Tuesday morning at the latest. France and Britain confirmed tonight that they had received their copies....
Most of the 10 nonpermanent members of the Council agreed - some very reluctantly - to be excluded for the time being from seeing the declaration, diplomats from those countries said. But Syria, the only Arab nation on the Council, strongly objected to favoring the permanent members, and accused Colombia, the country holding the rotating Council presidency this month, of violating basic diplomatic norms....
In arguing for early access to the Iraqi document, administration officials said the United States and the other permanent, veto-bearing members - Britain, France, Russia and China - did not need to wait for the United Nations to pick it clean of data that could foster nuclear proliferation. The five are already nuclear powers, the officials pointed out.
"We would have nothing to gain in terms of proliferation from reading an unsanitized version, because we already have that information" about the structure of nuclear weapons, a United States official said.
"This is not a question of asserting some special privilege," the United States ambassador, John D. Negroponte, said today. "It's more a question of drawing on the expertise of declared nuclear weapons states," he said, to expedite the analysis of the enormous declaration.
He called it "a win-win situation for everyone."...
It remained unclear when and how the nonpermanent members would have access to the nuclear information, in order to form a judgment about whether Iraq had failed to comply with its obligations.
"We are not happy," said Mikhail Wehbe, the Syrian ambassador. "It is in contradiction to the political logic, to the procedural logic, to every kind of logic the Security Council used to work on." The Council president normally acts only on the consensus of all 15 members.
Mexico was among the countries that went along without much enthusiasm today with the new arrangements. Secretary Powell spoke by telephone on Sunday with Foreign Minister Jorge G. Castañeda....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/10/international/middleeast/10NATI.html> -- Yoshie
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