Evidence to back up Iraq claims lacking

By CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press
December 23, 2002

WASHINGTON (AP) - Today's claims about Iraq could become tomorrow's call to arms, but not all of the Bush administration's statements have been supported by evidence.

Some the claims that haven't been backed up are central to the question of whether Americans should go to war.

The prime assertion that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction may have the weight of probability behind it, but no proof of it has been made public.

Behind that is a cast of supporting allegations, some of them veering off into murky territory.

Human-rights monitors, for example, say it is news to them that when Iraqi soldiers captured by Iran in the 1980s returned from that war, President Saddam Hussein ordered their ears cut off, as the Pentagon stated.

When President Bush flatly asserted that Saddam "possesses the most deadly arms of our age," he seemed to ignore the consensus that Iraq does not yet have nuclear weapons regardless of how actively it may be pursuing them.

A decade ago Americans preparing for their first war against Iraq were shocked when a Kuwaiti girl, testifying to Congress, said she saw Iraqi soldiers occupying her country take infants off of their respirators and let them die.

The story quickly became part of the first President Bush's campaign to win public support for the war. "Babies pulled from incubators and scattered like firewood across the floor," he said.

Only after the war did the story fall apart and the witness' true identity - the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States - become known.

With that in mind, Joe Stork, a Middle East monitor for Human Rights Watch, urged the government not to stretch its claims of Iraqi atrocities, because doing so can undermine confidence in carefully documented reports of genuine abuses.

"I do think the human-rights abuses in Iraq are systematic and serious," said Stork, whose group investigates mistreatment of citizens worldwide. "This is one of the worst governments in the world. There is absolutely no need to exaggerate."

On the crucial question of Iraqi weapons, knowledge of Saddam's past chemical and biological stockpiles, combined with shadowy actions since the world last had a good look around there, leads many analysts to think he is capable of causing huge destruction now.

But U.N. inspectors are still inspecting, some suspicions remain suppositions, and U.S. allies are waiting for a clincher.

"So far the inspectors have found nothing, and the U.S. has produced nothing," said Phyllis Bennis, a Middle East analyst for the liberal Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. "I'm not prepared to support a war on spec."

Other analysts put more weight behind U.S. allegations that Iraq has regenerated its biological weapons capabilities and may have chemical weapons, which it has used in the past, as well.

But the indictment offered by Washington last week accusing Iraq of being in "material breach" of the U.N. disarmament resolution rests not on what has been uncovered in the inspections but largely on what was omitted in Iraq's report on its weapons inventory.

On other fronts, U.S. officials have made several charges without offering support in the past few weeks.

For example, intelligence officials said Iraq has an audacious plan to destroy its own food sources, power supplies and oil fields, and blame America for it, if war against U.S. forces does not go well - all for the purpose of turning international opinion against Washington. They refused to describe their evidence.

Government sources also said in leaked comments that Islamic extremists affiliated with the al-Qaida network might have taken possession of the deadly chemical weapon VX while in Iraq. That claim weakened under examination.

U.S. officials have tried before to establish a connection between Iraq and the terrorist network that attacked America.

In this case, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would not talk about any Iraq-terrorist VX transaction but said: "I have seen other information over a period of time that suggests that could be happening."

But a variety of counter-terror and defense officials said later they had no credible evidence that Iraq supplied the nerve agent to al-Qaida operatives.

nIn Baghdad Sunday, Saddam's chief scientific adviser said American and British officials are rushing to judgment about Iraq's weapons report and should wait for U.N. arms inspectors to do their job. Amir al-Saadi complained that Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw based their criticisms on "old, rehashed reports" from the previous "discredited" arms inspection program in the 1990s.

Iraq's official news agency reported that Saddam accused the international community of doing too little to stop America's continued aggression toward his country.

"We have told the world we are not producing these kind of weapons, but it seems that the world is drugged, absent or in a weak position," Saddam said during talks with visiting Belarus envoy Nikolai Ivanchenko.

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