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Iraqi rebuttal sattellite photos { February 8 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://nytimes.com/2003/02/08/international/middleeast/08BAGH.htmlhttp://nytimes.com/2003/02/08/international/middleeast/08BAGH.html
February 8, 2003
Reporters on Ground Get Iraqi Rebuttal to Satellite Photos
By IAN FISHER
AL MUSAYYIB, Iraq, Feb. 7 — "No smoking — please!" the Iraqi official said, and he meant it.
In front of him were actual missiles — five of them, with a scattering of steel cases for the warheads — in a lot at a factory near here. Not just any factory, but one that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell showed the world this week in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council, charging that satellite photos had caught the Iraqis hiding things they did not want weapons inspectors to see.
"At this ballistic missile site on Nov. 10," Mr. Powell said at the United Nations on Wednesday, "we saw a cargo truck preparing to move ballistic missile components."
To which, Kareem Jabbar Yusuf, the manager of the plant near here, said, "It's all lies."
Thus was crystallized, under the sun in the steadily warming desert, the dynamic in the debate over whether to attack Iraq: American accusations, Iraqi denials and pretty much no way for anyone else to know where the truth lies.
But what is clear is that Iraq is working vigorously to present its version of events, the day before the two chief United Nations weapons inspectors' scheduled treturn to Baghdad for another round of last-minute talks. After devoting two news conferences this week to rebutting Mr. Powell's accusations that Iraq still possesses weapons of mass destruction, officials here escorted dozens of journalists to two sites that he singled out before the Security Council.
These were not the precise, scientific visits that the inspectors, who have gone to both sites several times since November, presumably enjoy. Rather, the scene was one of chaos, with journalists armed with little more knowledge than the transcript of Mr. Powell's speech jostling one another for scraps of Arabic translated on the fly.
Officials took reporters to Al Rafah plant, near Faluja, roughly 50 miles west of Baghdad, to view a new testing stand for Iraqi rockets. Under United Nations resolutions, Iraq is permitted to make rockets with a range of no more than 150 kilometers, or about 93 miles. But Mr. Powell alleged that this new testing stand was designed "for long-range missiles that can fly 1,200 kilometers," or about 745 miles.
"These are missiles that Iraq wants in order to project power, to threaten, and to deliver chemical, biological and, if we let him, nuclear warheads," Mr. Powell charged.
The new and unfinished stand, which rises in steel and concrete roughly 50 feet, is in fact, as Mr. Powell alleged, much larger than the old stand a few hundred yards away, which Iraq has used to test its rockets for more than a decade. The vent for the exhaust, a concrete channel embedded in the desert, is bigger, too, about 36 yards long, according to the plant's director, Ali Jassim.
But, Mr. Jassim said, the explanation is simple. Unlike the old stand, in which rockets are mounted and fired off in a vertical position, the new stand is designed to test the same permitted rockets lying horizontally, and thus the vent must be longer. This design, he said, was safer.
"By constructing this facility, we are taking precautions to keep people from getting burnt," he said.
As to whether this new stand could be used for rockets that go farther than 150 kilometers, he said that the inspectors visited here five times and made no complaints. Also, an aluminum roof, which Mr. Powell said was meant to conceal activities from satellites, is actually meant to protect the stand, Mr. Jassim said, "from rain and dust."
Here at Al Rashid company, the second stop on the tour, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, things look much as they did in the satellite photo taken in November. In front of a building full of the unfinished tail pieces of Fatah missile, surrounded by large earthen bunkers, sat a truck similar to the one in the photo — which Mr. Powell said was used to move components that Iraq wanted to conceal from the inspectors.
But the director of this plant, Mr. Yusuf, who showed off the empty inside of the truck, said it was used only to move "mechanical parts" allowed under United Nations regulations. Nothing unusual was happening in November, he said.
"Any day they would see constant activity here," he said. "Colin Powell could say any day that there is activity."
He said the plant had never been used for any prohibited weapons, including biological or chemical ones.
On the eve of a war that seems ever closer, one firm fact, at least, stands out: Both these plants were bombed extensively, either in the 1991 Persian Gulf war or in American-led missile strikes in 1998, after the last weapons inspections were called off.
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