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Inspect factory plant { December 4 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/international/middleeast/04CND-BAGH.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/international/middleeast/04CND-BAGH.html
December 4, 2002
Inspectors in Iraq Shift to Nuclear Plant and Former Factory
By JOHN F. BURNS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 4 — The new zero-tolerance weapons inspections shifted today from the elegance of one of Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces to a former chemical weapons factory in the desert and a nuclear complex once attacked by the Israelis.
The al-Muthanna State Establishment, 40 miles northwest of Baghdad, was destroyed by United Nations inspectors in the late 1990's after they found it was a key to the production of mustard gas, sarin and other deadly chemical weapons.
The object today was to make sure production had not resumed.
The al-Tuwaitha nuclear complex, about 16 miles southeast of Baghdad, was attacked by Israeli warplanes in 1981, destroying the nuclear reactor known as Tamouz.
New construction has shown up in satellite photographs since the site was heavily bombed in the gulf war, and inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, run by the United Nations, were thought to be checking out the new buildings.
But there has been nothing to compare in the inspectors' first week with the moment on Tuesday when two teams of United Nations inspectors in blue jeans and baseball caps emerged briskly from the early morning fog before one of Mr. Hussein's palaces and demanded that its imposing iron gates be rolled back for an immediate search.
For Iraqis, this was the stuff of the wildest imagination. In the 23 years he has been Iraq's absolute ruler, feared in every corner of this land, Mr. Hussein has built dozens of palaces, each more grandiose than the last. Vast and imperial, they are intended to overwhelm, and they do. Passing by, Iraqi drivers plead with passengers not to gaze, lest the very act convey an unhealthy interest or, perhaps fatally, disrespect.
This was, in a sense, the instant when the reach of American power made itself felt most keenly in Mr. Hussein's Iraq.
The inspectors' new mandate equips them with virtually unlimited powers of search and seizure, and Iraq's response to that power was evident as the government moved quickly to counter suggestions that inspectors had uncovered a breach.
The inspectors have the right to demand access to any of Mr. Hussein's palaces, at any time of day or night, and to go anywhere in the palaces, even into his bedrooms. The powers were written into the mandate on the demand of President Bush, and adopted by the United Nations after weeks of bare-knuckle American diplomacy.
This morning at 8:55, the new powers met their keenest test yet at the gates of Al Sajoud Palace, one of at least 20 that Mr. Hussein maintains here. Iraqi officials have complained bitterly during inspections elsewhere — at missile plants and nuclear research institutes and biological toxin factories — that the inspectors' step-aside authority inflicts unacceptable indignities.
But they have opened up on the instant all the same, conscious that Mr. Bush has said any defiance could bring on an American military attack.
The guards stood their ground this morning, but only long enough to make a symbolic point. Just seven minutes after the inspectors arrived in their cavalcade of white Land Cruisers, the guards stepped back. A large gathering of reporters was there to catch the moment, and with them a score of Iraqi minders, officials assigned to watch and listen to everything the reporters do.
Little was said, but facial expressions betrayed the strong mix of emotions that some of the minders admitted to later. It was as if, at that moment, something quite new in Iraq had been born, as though far more was opening in the Iraqi consciousness than just those gates.
The palace is far from Mr. Hussein's most astonishing, but it is not too shabby, either. Like much of the massivist architecture the Iraqi leader favors, it dominates by sheer size. The outer walls run half a mile on each side. On one side lies the Tigris, the broad, muddy river that flows down to the Persian Gulf. Between the palace and the river is an ornamental lake.
Nearby, conveniently, are the headquarters of the ruling Baath party, an immense pillared building that looks like something out of imperial Rome.
Since Iraq's defeat in the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Hussein has reached out to the rest of the Arab world by embracing Islam more assertively than before, and Al Sajoud, whose name comes from the Arabic word for bowing before God, reflects this.
The building, in tan brick, is crowned by a dome of blue mosaic traced with gold. The towering entranceway, with its curved arches, seems borrowed from a mosque. The grounds, with banks of red and yellow flowers in geometric-shaped beds, and water flowing in marbled channels, could have been modeled on the Moghul gardens of 16th-century India.
Reporters waited outside while the United Nations team entered from two gates on different sides of the grounds, to inhibit any effort by Iraqi officials to rush documents or computers or other secrets away.
All that was visible of the inspectors' work was what was captured by the Iraqi television crew that was allowed to accompany them. The film, made available to Western networks later, suggested that the search was mostly in the form of a polite walk-through.
Clutching clipboards, the inspectors, with United Nations armbands, could be seen moving through the marbled corridors, asking for doors to be unlocked here, opening cabinets there, speaking quietly to one another as Iraqi officials stood by.
According to one report circulating at United Nations headquarters later, Demetrius Perricos, the 67-year-old Greek-born nuclear chemist who leads the inspectors looking for evidence of banned chemical, biological and missile programs, paused at one point in the kitchen to sniff a marmalade jar. But perhaps that was apocryphal.
Hiro Ueki, the former Japanese diplomat who is spokesman for the teams, said later that the two-hour inspection had gone off without incident, and with courtesy on both sides. As they entered and left, none of the inspectors could be seen wielding the latest in high-tech radiation detectors and microbe sniffers they have used elsewhere.
In fact, much about the inspection suggested that it had not been ordered out of any real belief that Mr. Hussein might be hiding toxins in the cookie jars or enriched uranium in the socks, but to make the point, early on, that the inspectors are empowered to enter any of the palaces, and probably will.
Mr. Ueki said the inspectors had looked at "every corner and every room" of the palace. He declined to say whether they had found anything. He summarized the purpose in a way that made it sound mostly symbolic. "It was a first inspection of a presidential site," he said. "Our inspectors are authorized to inspect any site they choose."
Whatever the Iraqis made of the inspection, the inspectors appeared to be making their mark in Washington. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described the overall inspections as "off to a good start" and "working as intended." On a flight to Colombia, he was asked about Mr. Bush's remarks on Monday that the initial results of the inspections were "not encouraging." Mr. Powell said Mr. Bush was not referring to the inspections themselves, but to initial Iraqi denials.
But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking at the Pentagon, echoed Mr. Bush, saying: "The burden of proof is not on the United Nations or on the inspectors to prove that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The burden of proof is on the Iraqi regime to prove that it is disarming, as required by the successive U.N. resolutions."
At Al Sajoud Palace, Mr. Hussein was nowhere to be seen, but then he almost never is, apart from his ubiquitous presence on television, where he is shown endlessly meeting associates in the Revolutionary Command Council or being hailed by crowds in old film. For years, defectors have said, the 65-year-old leader has moved restlessly from place to place, sometimes several times a day, as a guard against assassination.
American intelligence officials seem to believe that he spends much of his time in his palaces, because in the gulf war and the attacks that followed the failure of the last round of weapons inspections in 1998, they ordered many palaces, including Al Sajoud, hit by cruise missiles and bombs.
Those inspections included searches of eight palaces, but under far different conditions from now. The Iraqis agreed in advance to the inspections, and foreign diplomats, many of them from countries friendly to Iraq, were always present. Their report could stand as the archetype of diplomatic inconclusiveness. The inspectors looked at more than 1,000 buildings, and reported that they found most empty.
When the inspectors left on Tuesday, reporters were allowed into the palace, but only into the entrance hall. What they saw confirmed what those earlier inspections suggested. If the lobby was a guide, either moving men had been by recently or Al Sajoud, doubled in size when it was rebuilt after the American missile attacks in 1998, performs much the same psychological function as Imelda Marcos's collection of hundreds of pairs of identical unworn shoes. There was nothing to suggest that the palace was actually lived in.
The walls were mostly bare, even of the one thing that is found in almost every entranceway in every home in Iraq, a portrait of Mr. Hussein. The white-cushioned furniture had a showroom look. On the tables, in place of elegant China or glassware, were models of the palace after being bombed, with a blackened hole in the dome, and as it is now. High in the atrium, in a cursive Arab script traced in gold, ancient poetry in praise of Baghdad ran around the base of the dome.
The only sign that Mr. Hussein might have ever been there appeared on the gigantic wood doors, locked to the reporters, that lead to the interior. On burnished gold roundels set into the woodwork were two Arabic letters.
"S.H.," they said.
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