Americans hijack Iraq weapons doc

As if the US wasn't already losing the PR war in its mad rush to war against Iraq...

Diplomats and U.S. officials said Monday that after an intense lobbying campaign, the United States received an early and uncut copy of Iraq's 11,807-page weapons declaration and whisked it to Washington for analysis.

The United States was then put in charge of making duplicates for its four fellow permanent members of the U.N. Security Council -- Britain, China, France and Russia -- on grounds that Washington had the best photocopying capabilities.

[...]

The Security Council had previously agreed to leave the report with U.N. inspectors until it was screened for material that might aid others in making weapons. All five permanent members are nuclear powers.

The decision upset several of the 10 non-permanent members of the 15-member Security Council, including Norway and Syria, as it overrode what the body had decided Friday.

And why would the Americans want first dibs at the document? Because it would allow it to scrub it clean of the names of foreign corporations that helped Iraq build its WMD programs.

Of course, there's an easy solution to this whole mess. Iraq should simply leak the document to the press. If the Bushies are insistent on starting this war, then I want to know what role American companies played in building Iraq's arsenal.

TBogg received an actual excerpt of the Bush Administration's version of the report.

Posted December 10, 2002 01:10 PM | Comments (34)