Iraq List Censored to Protect the Innocent and the Helpful
UNITED NATIONS — UNITED NATIONS -- When the 10 nonnuclear members of the Security Council receive their censored copy of Iraq's weapons declaration Monday, the reports will no longer contain Iraq's recipes for weapons of mass destruction. But another potentially volatile ingredient will be excised as well: the names of foreign companies that, knowingly or not, have supplied Iraq with weapons-making materials.
Security Council members are concerned not only that such disclosures might embarrass their nations' companies but also that Iraq might have set out to do so intentionally, by naming prestigious multinationals or firms connected with government officials.
For their part, U.N. inspectors say that they don't want to undermine any intelligence-gathering efforts done with the cooperation of companies and that they are also worried about liability issues.
"Should they be held responsible if they thought they were selling a fermenter to a beer company and it ended up in a biological weapons program in Iraq?" asked Ewen Buchanan of the U.N.'s inspection office.
It is not clear whether any of the companies or countries named on Iraq's current list are new to U.N. inspectors or whether they refer to previously unknown transactions. A nine-page index to the new Iraqi declaration suggests that, as in the past, Iraq has chiefly duplicated information about procurement activities that occurred before 1991.
But past Iraqi declarations and documents discovered by U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 "were littered with the names of suppliers," Buchanan said.
One set of Iraqi documents in particular, dating from 1996 and 1997, was "chockablock with supplier names, front companies, letters of credit and other details," recalled a former U.N. inspector who asked not to be identified. Those names, with the exception of several accidentally revealed in one U.N. report, have never been made public by the world body.
Although most of the declared deals were done legally before the Security Council ordered Baghdad to give up its weapons of mass destruction in 1991, they reveal the deceptions Iraq employed to obtain the building blocks of its weapons programs, especially its allegedly extensive biological weapons efforts.
