The Clipboard: Many missiles missing in Iraq, review of reports shows

From an article¹:

Dozens of ballistic missiles are missing in Iraq. Vials of dangerous microbes are unaccounted for. Sensitive sites, once under UN seal, stand gutted today, their arms-making gear hauled off by looters, or by arms makers.

The world now knows that Iraq had no threatening WMD programs. But two years after US teams began their futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has something else: a landscape of ruined military plants and of unanswered questions and loose ends, some potentially lethal, a review of official reporting shows.

The chief UN arms inspector, Demetrius Perricos, said that outsiders are seeing only a ''sliver" of the mess inside Iraq. He reports that satellite images indicate at least 90 sites in the old Iraqi military-industrial complex have been pillaged.

The US teams paint a similar picture. ''There is nothing but a concrete slab at locations where once stood plants or laboratories," the Iraq Survey Group said in its final report. But that report from inside Iraq, 986 pages thick, is at times thin on relevant hard information and silent in critically important areas.

Days after the report was issued last fall, for example, news leaked that tons of high-grade explosives had been looted a year earlier from the Iraqi complex at Al-Qaqaa. It was a potential boon to Iraq's car bombers, but the US document did not report this dangerous loss.

Similarly, the main body of the US report discusses Iraq's al-Samoud 2, but it does not note that many of these ballistic missiles have not been found. Only via an annex table does the report disclose that as many as 36 Samouds may be unaccounted for in the aftermath of the US-led invasion.

Seventy-five of the 26-foot-long, liquid-fueled missiles were destroyed under UN oversight before the war, because they too often exceeded the 93-mile range allowed for Iraqi missiles under the 12-year-old UN inspection regime. After the UN inspectors were evacuated on the eve of the US invasion, they lost track of the remaining missiles.

The Iraq Survey Group, which ended its arms hunt in December, says a complete accounting of the Samoud missiles ''may not be possible due to various factors."

Besides the al-Samouds, as many as 34 Fatah missiles, a similar but solid-fueled weapon, are also unaccounted for. More than 600 missile engines may be missing; the US document does not report their status.

Perricos, in an interview at his New York headquarters, expressed concern about the missiles. ''If they have been destroyed, somebody should know they've been destroyed or not. Have they gone somewhere?" he asked. (link)

I should probably stop being surprised as more and more evidence comes out that the Bush administration is incompetent.

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Complete text of the article, Many missiles missing in Iraq, review of reports shows, by Charles J. Hanley

Dozens of ballistic missiles are missing in Iraq. Vials of dangerous microbes are unaccounted for. Sensitive sites, once under UN seal, stand gutted today, their arms-making gear hauled off by looters, or by arms makers.

The world now knows that Iraq had no threatening WMD programs. But two years after US teams began their futile hunt for weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has something else: a landscape of ruined military plants and of unanswered questions and loose ends, some potentially lethal, a review of official reporting shows.

The chief UN arms inspector, Demetrius Perricos, said that outsiders are seeing only a ''sliver" of the mess inside Iraq. He reports that satellite images indicate at least 90 sites in the old Iraqi military-industrial complex have been pillaged.

The US teams paint a similar picture. ''There is nothing but a concrete slab at locations where once stood plants or laboratories," the Iraq Survey Group said in its final report. But that report from inside Iraq, 986 pages thick, is at times thin on relevant hard information and silent in critically important areas.

Days after the report was issued last fall, for example, news leaked that tons of high-grade explosives had been looted a year earlier from the Iraqi complex at Al-Qaqaa. It was a potential boon to Iraq's car bombers, but the US document did not report this dangerous loss.

Similarly, the main body of the US report discusses Iraq's al-Samoud 2, but it does not note that many of these ballistic missiles have not been found. Only via an annex table does the report disclose that as many as 36 Samouds may be unaccounted for in the aftermath of the US-led invasion.

Seventy-five of the 26-foot-long, liquid-fueled missiles were destroyed under UN oversight before the war, because they too often exceeded the 93-mile range allowed for Iraqi missiles under the 12-year-old UN inspection regime. After the UN inspectors were evacuated on the eve of the US invasion, they lost track of the remaining missiles.

The Iraq Survey Group, which ended its arms hunt in December, says a complete accounting of the Samoud missiles ''may not be possible due to various factors."

Besides the al-Samouds, as many as 34 Fatah missiles, a similar but solid-fueled weapon, are also unaccounted for. More than 600 missile engines may be missing; the US document does not report their status.

Perricos, in an interview at his New York headquarters, expressed concern about the missiles. ''If they have been destroyed, somebody should know they've been destroyed or not. Have they gone somewhere?" he asked.

The worry is not that Iraqi insurgents might field the missiles, he said, but that advanced Samoud or Fatah parts might secretly boost missile-building programs elsewhere in the region or beyond. ''The engines can easily be sold for a lot of money for the insurgency," he said.

Asked about gaps in Iraq Survey Group reporting -- specifically the silence on the Qaqaa explosives -- a CIA official replied, ''Our focus and goal was to find WMD, not conventional explosives." The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

Led by CIA special adviser Charles A. Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group discredited Bush administration claims of an Iraqi WMD threat by determining that Baghdad's programs to build nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons were shut down in 1991 under UN inspection.

But paperwork discrepancies and stray pieces from past programs -- from artillery shells to test tubes -- have left a ''residue of uncertainty," as the latest UN inspectors' report put it. On top of that, the disorder following the US-led invasion exposed dangerous material and equipment, previously under UN seal, to theft.

Samouds and Fatahs are only the biggest items on the ''unaccounted-for" list. The smallest are bits of bacterial growth for biological weapons.

The Iraqis said this bioweapons material was destroyed years ago, but not all is documented. Inspectors simply don't know whether vials of seed stock -- including deadly anthrax and botulinum A bacteria -- may have been used to nurture more batches that are unaccounted for.

''From bits in these original vials, you can create a hundred others, and we just want to know, has all this been traced?" Perricos asked. The Iraq Survey Group lists the fate of bioweapons seed stocks under ''Unresolved Issues."

The US arms hunters' findings further cloud the picture on another item, 155mm mustard-gas shells, which has a paperwork trail that leads to a dead end.

At least 13,000 shells filled with mustard were destroyed under UN supervision in the 1990s, but 550 were never found. Iraqis told UN inspectors they were destroyed in a fire. His account, otherwise unconfirmed, raises the prospect of the mustard, an incapacitating blistering agent, falling into the hands of the anti-US insurgency in Iraq.

reference=http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2005/03/27/many_missiles_missing_in_iraq_review_of_reports_shows/