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Section Five ------------ (1)U.S. criticized for Iraq policy, vows to try to improve UNITED NATIONS (AP) March 25. (2)Iraq decides to boost exports ahead of key OPEC meeting BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) March 25. (3)Iraq says it shot down another Iranian drone BAGHDAD, March 25 (AFP) (4)Iranian opposition hits back at US allegations NICOSIA, March 25 (AFP) (5)Iraqis reportedly got U.S. nuclear bomb plans off the library shelf WASHINGTON (AFP) — (6)U.N. Security Council Must Ease Iraq Crisis Humanitarian Emergency Should be Focus of Friday Debate(New York, March 23, 2000) (7)Annan Exhorts U.N. Council on 'Oil for Food' for Iraqis New York Times; New York; Mar 25, 2000; Barbara Crossette (8)Saddam's Sudan? New York Times; New York; Mar 23, 2000; William Safire (9)IRAQ GOT ITS NUCLEAR KNOW-HOW FROM U.S. LIBRARIES, EXPERT SAYS AGENTS SCOURED WORLD FOR DATA, REPORT STATES Times - Picayune; New Orleans, La.; Mar 23, 2000; Barbara Crossette 2000, The New York Times http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20000325_261.html :03/25/2000 02:19:00 ET U.S. criticized for Iraq policy, vows to try to improve UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ Friends and foes alike have publicly criticized the United States for its Iraq policy, saying the Iraqi people were suffering largely because of the U.S. hard line on sanctions. In a heated Security Council debate Friday, the United States countered that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was to blame for any hardships because he had prolonged sanctions by refusing to give up his weapons of mass destruction. Nevertheless, Deputy U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham said the United States would try to improve its record in implementing the U.N. humanitarian program for Iraq, which allows Baghdad to sell its oil through U.N.-monitored sales. Washington is releasing $100 million of the more than $1 billion in contracts for equipment purchases it had blocked and is reviewing ways to process contracts faster, Cunningham told the Security Council. The United States was also ready to approve a doubling in the amount of spare parts Iraq can buy to repair its dilapidated oil industry, he said. While the initiatives were welcomed, nearly every council ambassador said the United States had to do more to enable the U.N. oil-for-food program to better care for Iraqis, who have lived under sanctions for nearly a decade. "This `embargo generation' is a lost generation," said French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte. "How ironic is it that the same policy that is supposed to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction has itself become a weapon of mass destruction _ the deaths of innocent children," said Malaysian Ambassador Agam Hasmy. Iraq has been barred from selling oil on the open market since sweeping sanctions were imposed after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The U.N. oil-for-food program was launched in 1996 to provide for Iraqis suffering under the measures, which cannot be lifted until Iraq has rid itself of its weapons of mass destruction. While more than $6.7 billion worth of goods have arrived in Iraq since the relief program began, the United States has held up over $1 billion in contracts for equipment to rebuild Iraq's aging electricity, oil and water industries. Washington says it wants to make sure the equipment isn't used to help Saddam rebuild his weapons of mass destruction. But several ambassadors, even those more friendly to Washington, said the United States was taking its concerns too far, no matter how legitimate the threat of so-called "dual-use" imports. "Dual-use concerns need to be kept focused and realistic," Canadian Ambassador Robert Fowler said in urging the United States to better weigh the humanitarian impact of its policies. Most of the criticism leveled at the United States, however, came from countries more friendly with Baghdad. Russian Ambassador Sergey Lavrov said it was "inadmissible" to think that Iraq would resume cooperation with weapons inspectors with almost daily U.S. and British airstrikes in the northern and southern no-fly zones. Even Secretary-General Kofi Annan indirectly criticized the United States in his speech. "We are in danger of losing the argument or the propaganda war _ if we haven't already lost it _ about who is responsible for the situation: President Saddam Hussein or the United Nations," he said. ========== http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20000325_607.html :03/25/2000 08:14:00 ET Iraq decides to boost exports ahead of key OPEC meeting BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) _ In an apparent attempt to grab the initiative from OPEC, senior Oil Ministry officials said today that Iraq will boost exports by about 700,000 barrels a day in the coming few weeks. Word of the plan to increase exports from 1.6 million barrels a day to at least 2.3 million barrels a day comes as major oil producers are gathering in Vienna to review output levels. It is not clear what impact Iraq's move will have on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries decisions Monday. Ministry officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not hide their resentment of what they described as a U.S. policy of "muscle-twisting" to push OPEC to increase output. Iran's oil minister reiterated that appeal today, urging the cartel not to be intimidated by Washington. "U.S. pressures are meaningless to us. We hope OPEC members will not give in to political pressures," Iran's oil minister, Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, told state-run Tehran radio in Vienna. Oil revenues are almost Iraq's sole source of hard cash. The United Nations closely monitors Iraqi oil exports, but Iraq can pump as much as it wants under an adjustment to U.N. sanctions imposed for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Washington has been heavily lobbying oil-producing nations to increase supplies to drive down record-high prices that have left American consumers complaining about gasoline and heating oil costs. By substantially raising its exports, Iraq may be hoping OPEC ministers will decide to wait on across-the-board production increases or approve smaller ones than the United States wants. Foreign oil experts have said an additional 2 million to 2.5 million barrels daily are needed to replenish depleted inventories and satisfy growing demand. Early this year, Iraq slashed its exports by 400,000 barrels per day, citing the fragile state of its oil infrastructure. In the past few weeks, it has cut an additional 300,000 barrels a day. Late last year, Iraq was exporting an average of 2.3 million barrels a day. Oil Minister Amer Mohammed Rashid confirmed today in an interview with CNN that Iraq has reversed course. Rashid said the decision to increase exports was prompted by the removal of holds on contracts for the purchase of spare parts and a willingness by the Security Council to double the amount of equipment Iraq can buy to repair its shaky oil industry. The officials said exports will start rising early next and will reach 2.3 million barrels a day in a few weeks. They said Iraq intended to resume production at levels prevalent before the end of 1999, which they put at nearly 3 million barrels a day. Iraq is not part of OPEC's production ceiling, but Rashid has said he will ask OPEC to set a quota for Iraq of no less than 3 million barrels a day. Rashid warned, however, that Iraq will "be forced to alter its decision" to boost exports if the United States continues placing its contracts on hold. ======================= http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=asia/headline s/000325/world/afp/Iraq_says_it_shot_down_another_Iranian_drone.html Saturday, March 25 9:10 PM SGT Iraq says it shot down another Iranian drone BAGHDAD, March 25 (AFP) - Iraq said Saturday it shot down an Iranian pilotless plane over the south of the country, in the second such incident this month. The commander of Iraq's air defences, quoted by the official news agency INA, said the drone was shot down on Friday over the Al-Azair region of Missan province, some 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of Baghdad. The Iraqi military has said it also downed an Iranian drone on March 13, near the border with Iran. On Wednesday, Iraq blamed Iran for a mortar attack that killed four people in Baghdad in apparent retaliation for a similar strike in Tehran claimed by Iran's armed opposition, which is based in Iraq. -------------- http://asia.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/world/article.html?s=asia/headline s/000325/world/afp/Iranian_opposition_hits_back_at_US_allegations.html Saturday, March 25 4:23 PM SGT Iranian opposition hits back at US allegations NICOSIA, March 25 (AFP) - Iran's armed opposition, the People's Mujahedeen, hit back Saturday at US State Department allegations that Iraq had use tens of millions of dollars earned from smuggling oil to build a base for the group. In a statement faxed to AFP in Nicosia, the Iraq-based Mujahedeen said that its "bases and centres have all been built from their own funds, raised from contributions by the people of Iran. "A plethora of documents backing this assertion is available for anyone interested and can be published." The State Department Friday released a satellite photograph showing military installations located in the city of Faluja, west of Baghdad, that US officials say can accommodate between 3,000 and 5,000 fighters. "It will be used to coordinate MEK terrorist activities and to plan attacks against targets in Iran and elsewhere," said State Department spokesman James Rubin. MEK is an acronym for the People's Mujahedeen, which for the past three years has been designated by the State Department as a terrorist organization. The Mujahedeen retorted Saturday, "There is nothing secret or hidden about the camps and centres of .... the Iranian Resistance in the Iran-Iraq border region, Baghdad and west of Baghdad." These bases had come under attack 88 times by "the religious, terrorist dictatorship ruling Iran" since 1993, it said. They had also been visited by UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, who acknowledged they were not under Iraqi control, the statement added. Camp Bagherzadeh, the site featured in the State Department photograph, was nothing new, it said, having been inspected by UNSCOM in September 1997 and visited by foreign journalists on dozens of occasions. US State Department spokesman James Rubin said Friday that by releasing the satellite photo the United States wanted to illustrate "the threat that Saddam Hussein poses because of his willingness to spend money that he has to provide direct state sponsorship for terrorism." The State Department action came as the UN Security Council was discussing the humanitarian situation in Iraq after nine years of international sanctions. The Mujahedeen statement noted that the New York Times quoted a senior US official as saying "this is a propaganda campaign" being used against any easing of the sanctions. J.T. 3/24-25 =============== http://www.accessme.com/jordantimes/Fri/news/news5.htm Iraqis reportedly got U.S. nuclear bomb plans off the library shelf WASHINGTON (AFP) — Iraqi students and scientists living in the United States prior to the 1991 Gulf War obtained information on how to make nuclear bombs and sent it back to Iraq, according to a former Iraqi official cited by the New York Times on Thursday. The students and scientists simply gathered the data from university libraries and scientific conferences, the Times said. The former official, Khidhir Hamza, made the assertions in a report he prepared late last year for the Institute for Science and International Security, an independent, Washington-based research group, the Times reported. The institute had been asked by the U.S. Department of Energy to interview Hamza, who had held several high-level positions in the Iraqi government prior to defecting in 1995. U.S. officials wanted to know whether U.S. secrets had been obtained by Iraq, and if so how. Some experts on nuclear disarmament believe that some Iraqi exiles living in the United States may still be under pressure to gather information for Iraqi intelligence agents, according to the paper. The Times said some Iraqi exiles believe their activities are still being monitored by agents of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. However, Iraqi students essentially have been barred from travelling to study overseas since 1990, and that in combination with Iraq's international isolation, due to sanctions imposed on the country since the war, have made it nearly impossible for Baghdad to collect information in the same way. David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told the Times that Hamza's report described a wide-ranging and well-financed Iraqi effort, beginning in the 1970s, to build a nuclear weapon. The effort involved scouring the worlds scientific libraries, company databases and conference papers, and it continued through Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the Gulf War in 1991, Albright told the Times. In any case, the information gathered from the United States probably was not sufficient alone to complete work on a nuclear weapon, the newspaper said. ========================= http://www.hrw.org/press/2000/03/iraq0323.htm U.N. Security Council Must Ease Iraq Crisis Humanitarian Emergency Should be Focus of Friday Debate (New York, March 23, 2000) In a letter sent yesterday, Human Rights Watch and five other organizations asked the United Nations Security Council to take decisive steps to address the humanitarian emergency in Iraq. The letter urged member states to use the Iraq debate scheduled for this Friday, March 24, to address the crisis "in a thorough and transparent manner" and to give priority to fundamental humanitarian and human rights principles in the design and operation of the sanctions regime. The Council should make Friday's meeting open and public, and the U.S. should stop pretending that the sanctions have nothing to do with the dire public health crisis confronting millions of Iraqis. Hanny Megally Executive Director Middle East and North Africa Division Human Rights Watch "The Council should make Friday's meeting open and public," said Hanny Megally, executive director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, "and the U.S. should stop pretending that the sanctions have nothing to do with the dire public health crisis confronting millions of Iraqis." Megally also criticized the many "holds," which stop contracts without rejecting them, that the United States and the United Kingdom have placed on key Iraqi imports. Related Materials Restructure Iraq Embargo, Try Leaders for War Crimes HRW Press Release, January 5, 2000 The signatories of today's letter include Save the Children/UK and the Mennonite Central Committee, which have ongoing humanitarian aid programs in Iraq. In early January, Human Rights Watch asked the Security Council to lift most restrictions on Iraq's non-military trade and investment while tightening controls on the country's ability to import weapons-related goods. The organization, citing its own extensive documentation of government responsibility for genocide and crimes against humanity, also called for the establishment of an international criminal tribunal to try top Iraqi leaders. The Security Council scheduled this Friday's meeting to discuss the Secretary-General's March 10 report on the oil-for-food program (S/2000/208). In that report the Secretary-General noted that an "excessive number of holds" continued to impede the relief program and regretted that the sanctions committee, made up of the Security Council member states, had not responded to his earlier request that it provide "written and explicit explanations" regarding holds within twenty-four hours (paragraphs 84 and 87). The Secretary-General's report cited as an example the hold on a harbor dredger for the port of Umm Qasr, Iraq's major port of entry, an item whose absence makes the offloading of vital food and spare parts slow and inefficient (paragraph 72). "This appears to be an instance where concern for potential dual use lacks balance and a sense of proportion," said Megally, "It makes a mockery of the Council's stated concern for the well-being of ordinary people." Holds on contracts in the water and sanitation and electric power sectors, the report said, have been a major factor impeding progress in the area of public health, where emergency conditions persist. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in a December 1999 report, said that the oil-for-food program "has not halted the collapse of the health system and the deterioration of water supplies, which together pose one of the gravest threats to the health and well being of the civilian population." (E-mail Rania Masri for a copy of the letter) ----------- Annan Exhorts U.N. Council on 'Oil for Food' for Iraqis New York Times; New York; Mar 25, 2000; Barbara Crossette Secretary General Kofi Annan warned today that the United Nations was in danger of losing a propaganda war with President Saddam Hussein of Iraq if the ''oil for food'' program intended to help Iraqi civilians suffering under sanctions is not made more effective immediately. ''The humanitarian situation in Iraq poses a serious moral dilemma for this organization,'' Mr. Annan told the council. ''The United Nations has always been on the side of the vulnerable and the weak, and has always sought to relieve suffering, yet here we are accused of causing suffering to an entire population.'' He was speaking at a special daylong Security Council session to review the organization's work in Iraq, during which the United States was on the defensive against criticism that it is blunting the positive impact of the program by blocking more than 1,000 import contracts. Responding to such charges, James B. Cunningham, the deputy American representative at the United Nations, announced today that the United States was lifting its holds, in the committee on sanctions against Iraq, on 70 contracts worth at least $100 million. The United States also formally introduced its resolution doubling to $600 million the value of oil equipment Iraq may import every six months. The amount of oil Iraq can export has not been limited since December. Richard C. Holbrooke, the American representative, was not in the Security Council today. He has played down the Iraq issue since his arrival in August, showing little interest in a long-running Clinton administration policy that has drawn rebukes against the United States. He has turned the Iraq file over to Mr. Cunningham, who is more familiar with the issue, having been posted here when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, an invasion that led to the imposition of international sanctions. Today, Mr. Cunningham offered several proposals for better supervision in Iraq, so that American suspicions about the ultimate use or destinations of certain imported goods, including electrical, scientific, telecommunications and oil equipment, could be reduced. Even with current Iraqi problems, Mr. Cunningham said, Iraq's oil exports and food imports are reaching the levels that prevailed before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. In a long speech accompanied by statistical material circulated to council members, Mr. Cunningham continued to place much of the blame for shortcomings in the oil sales plan on Mr. Hussein's government, which, he said, refuses to expedite orders, share information or allow inspections at many sites. Mr. Annan also took the Iraqis to task, saying people living under sanctions are ''often victims both of their own government and of the measures taken against it.'' The only way to end that, he added, is for Iraq to comply with council decisions. The council is waiting to see whether Mr. Hussein will allow the return of weapons inspectors, the key to ending sanctions. But Mr. Annan expressed anguish over the position the United Nations now finds itself in, with an uncooperative Iraq on one side and an intransigent United States on the other. ''We are in danger of losing the argument, or the propaganda war -- if we haven't already lost it -- about who is responsible for this situation, President Saddam Hussein or the United Nations,'' he said. During today's debate, several council members tried to shift from past blame to future efforts to make the ''oil for food'' program work. Sir Jeremy Greenstock of Britain, speaking to reporters before this afternoon's session, said there were numerous things the council could do without further debate. ''We can speed the procedures in the sanctions committee,'' he said. ''We can inject more cash into the U.N. program in Iraq. We can start to stop the smuggling that is going on, the illegal oil sales. We can increase the number of monitors looking at the program's delivery in Iraq, and if we do that, we can bring down the number of holds.'' The Russians, French and Chinese were most critical today of the American and British positions on Iraq. Sergey Lavrov, the Russian representative, accused the United States and Britain of killing more than 140 people and wounding hundreds in attacks in the no-flight zones in northern and southern Iraq. ''Any explanation that these strikes were not directed at civilians does not hold water,'' Mr. Lavrov said. He called for an early suspension of sanctions. Peter van Walsum, the Dutch representative and chairman of the committee on sanctions against Iraq, said that despite differences, there was a council consensus that Iraq still has to convince the world that it does not have dreams of creating prohibited weapons. ''Iraq is the only country in modern history that has not only attempted to develop all categories of weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological and chemical -- but has actually used such weapons, both against a foreign enemy and against its own citizens,'' Mr. van Walsum said. ''In doing so, Iraq has placed itself in a league of its own.'' Until today, two issues lying at the heart of the debate on Iraq had rarely been raised. One is the scarcity of verifiable information beyond what is physically visible to United Nations officials in Iraq -- whose appointments Baghdad can control in the sense that it can reject nominees for relief positions, and whose movements are frequently circumscribed. All health and poverty figures the United Nations has to work with are provided by the Iraqi government. Journalists cannot report freely in the country, and the international news agencies there must use Iraqi citizens for day-to-day reporting, which usually amounts to no more than repeating what officials say in the state-controlled press. Iraqi government decisions are often opaque, some United Nations officials say. In some ministries, there appears to be little planning for social development using what funds are available to the government from its own resources. The second issued seldom raised before now is that in the virtual absence of independent information-gathering in Iraq, critics of Mr. Hussein say, the effects of sanctions can be manipulated to influence public opinion inside and outside the country, as a few speakers noted today. Richard Butler, a diplomat in residence at the Council on Foreign Relations, who was chief arms inspector in Iraq from 1997 to 1999, argues that sanctions worked when they were first imposed. ''Sanctions might work initially, depending not on how severe they are or how the leadership reacts to them,'' he said in an interview on Wednesday. ''They did, in the Iraq case, concentrate their minds for a while.'' But the longer sanctions are applied, Mr. Butler said, ''the less and less effective they become, to the point where they invert in their effectiveness for two reasons. One, they get busted through a black market, and two, the leadership is able to parlay this into a reason for staying in power. ''I think that's exactly where Saddam is now,'' he said. ''He's saying, 'Only I can protect you from all those bad people out there, and that's why you've got to stick with me.' '' =========== Saddam's Sudan? New York Times; New York; Mar 23, 2000; William Safire What do you do with a disturbing national security tip from a usually reliable source? You check it out, of course, with intelligence operatives who have no ax to grind. But what do you do when those analysts say that they pondered the report at interagency meetings and doubt its accuracy -- but it could be true and bears watching? All I can do is pass along the disputed report with appropriate caveats. It was first hinted at six months ago in a paragraph by the well-connected Bill Gertz of The Washington Times: ''A Pentagon intelligence agency reported earlier this month that North Korea offered to sell the government of Sudan an entire factory for assembling Scud missiles.'' That didn't seem to add up, because Sudan is nearly broke and doesn't need long-range missiles to fight its civil war. Where would the money be found to finance the missile factory, and who in that area wants the Scuds? Enter Amir Rashid, Iraq's oil minister and Saddam Hussein's chief procurer of ballistic missiles. Two years ago, I'm told, Rashid paid a secret visit to Pyongyang and saw North Korea's missile marketer, Chon Byong-Ho. Saddam's man also visited the Chang Gwang Sinyong Corporation, a key world source of illicit arms. Topic A was Scuds, many of which were secreted by Iraq in Sudan to escape U.N. detection. A year later, Iraq's chief engineer, Ra'ad Ismail Jamil, received a North Korean delegation in Baghdad. Only five weeks ago, says my informant, two delegations arrived in Khartoum, capital of Sudan. One was a group of North Korean technical experts; the other was a military research mission from Baghdad. Their project? The Koreans are said to be working on building a ballistic-missile plant near Khartoum, with Iraqi financing of $475 million. Pyongyang gets a big chunk of that for turnkey construction and expert staffing; Khartoum a smaller percentage for acting as cutout, site protector and smuggler; and Baghdad gets its old missiles refurbished and new, longer-range missiles built. If true, such conspiracy among three rogue nations would spell big trouble. So I rattled some American intelligence cages; had they heard of this three-pariah missile deal? All had. The story (without the recent Khartoum meeting) has been bruited about for months, including the $475 million figure. It was the subject of two interagency meetings; the White House was briefed. The current U.S. assessment is that any Iraqi-financed missile factory ''cannot be confirmed,'' although there is no doubt that North Korea has been peddling arms in Sudan. ''The report is impossible to stamp out,'' says a frustrated doubter. Another derogates the story that won't go away as ''rumint'' -- merely rumored intelligence. Their logical reason for skepticism is that Sudan is heavily infiltrated by Iranian operatives, who might sabotage or publicize any Iraqi plant. Another is that newly secure Pyongyang is now in the midst of a charm offensive, which will soon include the first visit to Washington by a high-level diplomat since the end of the Korean War. This huge weapons deal would run counter to that opening. On the other hand, there is reason for skepticism about the spookery's skepticism. Eighteen months ago, on indirect evidence later questioned, President Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack at the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant. Our spies may now be super-cautious. On the third hand, I am inclined to take the rumint seriously because this method of outsourcing his secret weapons development to a rogue-state neighbor so neatly fits Saddam Hussein's interest. Also, if true, a secret Sudanese missile plant financed by Iraqi oil sales would argue cogently against efforts to appease Saddam by lifting economic sanctions, so avidly desired by the Jiang-Putin-Chirac cabal at the U.N. Wait -- this just in. Porter Goss, chairman of the Permanent House Select Committee on Intelligence, is willing to go on the record: ''We have been concerned with the development of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems in Sudan, as well as Sudan's ties with North Korea. The matter is receiving our attention.'' =========== IRAQ GOT ITS NUCLEAR KNOW-HOW FROM U.S. LIBRARIES, EXPERT SAYS AGENTS SCOURED WORLD FOR DATA, REPORT STATES Times - Picayune; New Orleans, La.; Mar 23, 2000; Barbara Crossette 2000, The New York Times Full Text:Copyright Times Picayune Publishing Company Mar 23, 2000 A former high-ranking official in Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program says that before the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Iraqi students in the United States combed university libraries for bomb-building information, and Iraqi agents and scientists collected valuable data at American scientific conferences. Khidhir Hamza, who held several high-level jobs in Iraq before his defection in 1995, made his claims in a report prepared late last year for the Institute for Science and International Security, an independent research group in Washington. The Department of Energy had asked the institute to interview Hamza about how Iraq obtained scientific information. Government officials were interested in knowing whether any critical American secrets had fallen into Iraqi hands and how those leaks could be plugged. A few disarmament experts question whether some Iraqi exiles living in the United States may still be under pressure from Iraqi intelligence agents to continue sharing information. Iraqi exiles say agents of Saddam Hussein's government still follow their activities. Since 1990, however, Iraqi students have effectively been barred from traveling abroad to study, and Iraq has been isolated through international sanctions that have made it virtually impossible for its government to continue gathering information in the same way. David Albright, an American scientist and nuclear arms expert who is president of the institute, said that on some important issues, Hamza's report was disappointing in its lack of detail and solid advice on how to counter foreign spying strategies. But the report, turned over to the Energy Department by Albright in November and recently released as an unclassified document, showed that the Iraqi effort allowed Hussein's government to build the foundations of a nuclear weapons program, though the scientific information gained in the United States probably was not sufficient in itself to finish the work on a weapon. The report nevertheless paints a picture of an exceptionally broad and well-financed Iraqi effort to build a nuclear weapon by scouring the world's scientific libraries, company data bases and conference papers beginning in the 1970s and continuing until Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the war that followed early the next year. After the war, U.N. inspectors found that Iraq's nuclear weapons program was more advanced than expected. It was dismantled, but questions remain about how easily Iraq would be able to restart it. The report adds another dimension to official investigations in the United States and Britain that until now focused largely on Iraq's efforts to buy crucial equipment illegally from Western countries. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a discussion list run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq For removal from list, email soc-casi-discuss-request@lists.cam.ac.uk Full details of CASI's various lists can be found on the CASI website: http://welcome.to/casi