Iraq - British report full of 'lies'

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq says war and U.N. inspections have ensured it is no longer capable of producing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, and Baghdad released a detailed report Wednesday rebutting a British dossier on its arms programs.

Washington says toppling Saddam Hussein may be the only way to ensure Iraq is not rearming. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been a strong backer of the United States on Iraq, issued a 50-page dossier last week detailing what British intelligence said was Iraq's growing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and Saddam's plans to use them. Blair also said Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons.

The dossier, Iraq's Foreign Ministry said in its 29-page, English-language rebuttal, was "full of lies, fabrications and fallacies."

"Iraq's capabilities to produce biological, chemical agents were destroyed during the 1991 aggression," the Foreign Ministry said, referring to the Gulf War that forced Iraq to reverse its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Iraq said its chemical program never advanced beyond a "crude" level and that U.N. inspectors after the Gulf War destroyed stocks of chemical weapons, munitions and production equipment.

Iraq said it cooperated with inspectors and described their destruction during seven years of work of such items as entire buildings at nuclear sites, missiles, 400 rockets filled with Sarin, and even "the furniture, desks, cooling systems, refrigerators, science books and journals" at a biological weapons laboratory.

Just as Blair's dossier seemed to offer little new evidence, Iraq's rebuttal reiterated its long-standing position that by 1998 it had complied with U.N. resolutions barring it from stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them.

U.N. inspectors, accusing Iraq of blocking their work, withdrew from Iraq in December 1998 ahead of U.S.-British airstrikes.

In its rebuttal, Iraq said that since then, any biological agents would have lost their effectiveness, its nuclear program remained under International Atomic Energy Agency scrutiny and monitoring of its imports was tight.