Declaration includes nuke secrets of past

A former inspector said it appears the Iraqis have resubmitted old reports.
COMBINED DISPATCHES
UNITED NATIONS -- Iraq's arms declaration includes information on its past secret efforts to build a nuclear weapon and may list countries or companies that helped it in its illicit arms programs, according to a nine-page table of contents.
The declaration also provides details of Baghdad's efforts to build biological weapons, the table, distributed by a U.S. official, indicated. Washington was also given a copy of the full 12,000 page declaration Monday.
A small army of U.S. experts began checking the 11,807-page account against intelligence gathered by spies, satellites and other covert means.
Although the White House National Security Council is coordinating the overall effort, the CIA is leading the closed-door review at its headquarters in Langley, Va.
High-level task forces also have been mobilized at the Pentagon, the State Department and the Energy Department to help search for distortions, omissions or discrepancies in the massive Iraqi document, as well as tips for further investigation.
A former inspector who reviewed the table of contents said it appeared Iraqis were resubmitting old reports from the wake of the Gulf War more than a decade ago. Inspectors have said Iraq's previous declarations were incomplete.
David Albright, an American who served on the nuclear inspections team in the 1990s, said the table "seems to confirm that on the nuclear side, the declaration has been recycled. A lot of this is pre-1991," he said.
Iraq asserts in the declaration that it no longer has weapons of mass destruction or the means to deliver them -- an assertion contested by the United States.
"We are firm in our belief, in our knowledge that Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction, has had programs to maintain them and expand them, and still has these weapons of mass destruction," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
The United States took the U.N. Security Council's full declaration and distributed it to the council's four other permanent members -- Britain, France, Russia and China.
Four sections
The table of contents released to the public has four sections: nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile programs.
The nuclear program before 1991 takes up 2,100 pages of the document, and an additional 300 pages in Arabic detail current nuclear programs, according to the table. Baghdad says the current programs are civilian.
Officials said Monday they have not set a deadline for an initial U.S. assessment. Nor have they set a date to determine whether Iraq has met its obligations to provide the U.N. Security Council with full disclosure of its illegal weapons programs.
U.S. analysts and technicians will rely on "the whole panoply" of U.S. and allied intelligence collection efforts, one intelligence official said, including spies and defectors, satellite images and electronic intercepts of Iraqi government and military communications.
They also will compare the new document to reports compiled by U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency inspection teams working in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and to the more than a dozen supposedly "final" arms declarations issued by Iraq during that time.
Much of the recent U.S. collection effort has focused on Iraq's global network of front companies and other efforts to illegally obtain and import raw materials, spare parts and highly specialized tools and equipment for prohibited weapons programs.
"There's not a single 'gotcha' here," the official said of the procurement schemes. "But considering all we know, it would be an extraordinary set of coincidences if they aren't doing something illegal."