Security Council will be told more inspections are needed

VIENNA, Austria -- The United Nations' nuclear chief will tell the Security Council that further inspections are needed to verify Saddam Hussein's claims that he has no weapons of mass destruction, U.N. officials said Wednesday.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency leading the hunt for nuclear weaponry in Iraq, will make a case for more inspections when he briefs the council at U.N. headquarters in New York today, an IAEA official told The Associated Press.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said "there's nothing new in what we've seen" of the nuclear portion of the declaration that Baghdad submitted to the United Nations earlier this month. "It's largely what we've seen before."

"That's not a value judgment on the document," the official said. "It's just saying we've got to get out there and verify it."

ElBaradei will carry that message to the Security Council, and will resist pressure to declare that Iraq has violated Resolution 1441, which required it to make a full and complete disclosure of its weapons programs, the official said.

ElBaradei will brief the council along with Hans Blix, the chief U.N. inspector whose U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission is in charge of searching for biological and chemical weapons and long-range missiles in Iraq.

Blix's spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said: "We will report objectively to the Security Council, but it's up to them to decide what constitutes a material breach, not to us."

The Security Council resolution, adopted Nov. 8, states that false statements or omissions in Iraq's declaration and Saddam's failure to cooperate with inspections will constitute a new "material breach" that will be reported to the council for assessment.

The United States initially wanted any false statement or omission to be declared a "material breach," but France and Russia insisted that this be coupled with an Iraqi failure to cooperate on the ground -- and they won this point in the final resolution.

Although Iraq steadfastly denies that it has weapons of mass destruction, the United States and Britain contend it does and have called the Iraqi declaration incomplete.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Wednesday called the 12,000-page dossier an "obvious falsehood." White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said President Bush found "omissions" and "problems" in the declaration.

ElBaradei and Blix have urged any country with information about Iraqi weapons programs to give it to inspectors to check out.

ElBaradei will stick to his contention that only a comprehensive inspection regime -- even if it takes a year as the IAEA has said -- will show whether Saddam is telling the truth.

"The Iraqis claim they've done nothing illegal. We've just got to find out if that's the case," the IAEA official told AP.

IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said the agency would resist pressure from the Bush administration to rush to judgment on whether Iraq has an active nuclear program. The agency has been analyzing 2,400 pages from the declaration that deal with nuclear issues.

"If we said after a month, 'Yup, they're clear of nuclear weapons,' no one in his right mind would believe us," Gwozdecky said. "We understand the political pressure to move quickly, but we will not compromise the technical quality of our inspections."

Gwozdecky said ElBaradei was committed to taking time to let science determine the nature of Iraq's weapons programs.

"Isn't it worth a year to get a peaceful solution to this problem?" he asked.

"It's like a criminal murder trial. The defense has said, 'My client is innocent. I intend to prove it.' Then you spend weeks and months proving it. It takes time to do so. Would you expect any jury to convict based on just one month of investigation?"

By the end of the 1991 Gulf War, inspectors discovered the oil-rich nation had imported thousands of pounds of uranium, some of which was already refined for weapons use, and had considered two types of nuclear delivery systems.

Inspectors seized the uranium, destroyed facilities and chemicals, dismantled over 40 missiles and confiscated thousands of documents.

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