Address Gets Down to Specifics

After refusing for months to divulge its evidence against Iraq, the Bush administration unfurled an astonishing array of newly declassified intelligence Wednesday.

Like a prosecutor trying to persuade a skeptical jury with reams of circumstantial evidence, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell offered fresh accusations of Iraqi wrongdoing and fleshed out previous allegations with new detail. Powell charged that:

* Baghdad has moved weapons, hidden documents, replaced computer hard drives and even razed buildings and removed topsoil to deceive U.N. weapons inspectors. In all, Iraq has cleared nearly 30 suspected sites of incriminating material since last fall.

* Iraq’s illegal procurement network around the world continues to seek toxins used in biological weapons, precursor chemicals for nerve and blister agents, special tubes and magnets needed to enrich uranium, and other prohibited materials.

* Hussein’s regime built specially designed trailer trucks and railroad cars as clandestine mobile laboratories to develop and produce such germ warfare agents as anthrax and botulinum toxin. In all, Iraq has outfitted at least 18 large trucks as mobile production facilities.

* The Iraqi dictator has personally tried to prevent scientists from cooperating with U.N. inspectors. In December, he had scientists sign documents acknowledging that divulging sensitive information to inspectors is punishable by death. He also warned that any scientist who agreed to be interviewed outside Iraq -- as the U.N. Security Council has demanded -- would be treated as a spy.

* Baghdad harbors a terrorist network, including several Al Qaeda operatives who fled Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Chief among them is Abu Musab Zarqawi, an associate of Osama bin Laden with expertise in chemical and biological weapons.

* Iraq performed gruesome germ warfare experiments on 1,600 condemned prisoners in 1995. A witness saw prisoners tied down to beds while deadly experiments were performed on them.

Several former U.N. weapons inspectors said Powell’s data showed that Iraq had developed and deployed far more sophisticated techniques to hide incriminating materials than Baghdad used between 1991 and 1998, when the first U.N. inspection system was in effect.

“We used to say we were one step behind the Iraqis,” said Steven Black, who served six years as a U.N. inspector. “Now they’re so far in front, we’re not even in the same league.”

Other former inspectors, however, said Powell may have exaggerated or misunderstood some of the intelligence.

Rolf Ekeus, who headed the U.N. inspection teams from 1991 to 1997, said Powell “overshot, almost embarrassingly so,” in interpreting a Jan. 20 conversation between two Republican Guard officers to mean they were talking about hiding chemical warheads.

But Ekeus and others agreed that Powell all but proved that Iraq is deliberately concealing its current and former weapons activities. “The case was made that Iraq isn’t complying and doesn’t intend to,” said David Albright, another former U.N. inspector.

Powell said Hussein had created a “higher committee for monitoring the inspection teams” to spy on them and to keep them from doing their jobs.

He said the special committee reported directly to Hussein and is headed by Iraq’s vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan. Among its members are Hussein’s younger son and security chief, Qusai. Orders were issued to Iraq’s security organizations, as well as to Hussein’s own office, to “hide all correspondence” with the Organization of Military Industrialization, the Iraqi agency that oversees illicit weapons activities, Powell said.

In addition, he said, Qusai Hussein had ordered all prohibited weapons removed from his father’s palaces. U.N. inspectors were repeatedly barred from entering Hussein’s palace complexes during the 1990s but have been granted entry since their return in November.

“We know that Iraqi government officials, members of the ruling Baath Party and scientists have hidden prohibited items in their homes,” Powell said. “Other key files from military and scientific establishments have been placed in cars that are being driven around the countryside by Iraqi intelligence agents to avoid detection.”

Powell said the Iraqis have moved illicit weapons as well. During the Security Council debate on Iraq last fall, he said, Baghdad dispersed “rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent” to dense groves of palm trees and other sites in western Iraq.

“From our sources, we know that inspectors are under constant surveillance by an army of Iraqi intelligence operatives,” Powell said. “Iraq is relentlessly attempting to tap all of their communications, both voice and electronic.”

As part of its effort to stymie inspectors, Powell said, Iraq has provided special training on “evasion methods” and “interrogation resistance techniques” to Iraqi experts likely to deal with inspectors.

In addition, he said, weapons experts at one facility were replaced by Iraqi intelligence agents in mid-December to deceive visiting U.N. inspectors. In another case, Iraqi officials issued a false death certificate “on orders from Saddam Hussein” for an important scientist who then was sent into hiding.

Last month, Powell said, experts at a weapons-related facility were “ordered to stay home” to avoid inspectors, and workers from other military facilities were sent to replace them. A dozen other experts have been confined “under house arrest” at one of Hussein’s guest houses.

Powell also provided new details about what he called Iraq’s efforts to build drone aircraft to spray biological agents and poison gas.

In December, Iraq told the U.N. that its current fleet of drones had a maximum range of about 50 miles. But Powell said U.S. intelligence detected an unmanned Iraqi plane June 27 flying more than 300 miles “nonstop on autopilot” in a racetrack pattern.

He thus provided the first public explanation for President Bush’s widely questioned claim last fall that Iraq possesses unmanned aircraft that could deliver chemical or biological agents to its neighbors or, if transported, to America.

Powell also showed satellite photos and other material he said indicate that Iraq is pursuing programs to build long-range missiles, including one able to fly more than 700 miles. U.N. resolutions approved after the 1991 Persian Gulf War prohibit Baghdad from building missiles able to fly more than 93 miles.

Powell acknowledged “differences of opinion” on the significance of Iraq’s widely publicized efforts to import high-specification aluminum tubes.

He said “most U.S. experts” believe that the tubes are intended as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, but that was disputed by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

But Powell disclosed that several batches of tubes were “seized clandestinely before they reached Baghdad” and that at least some now are in U.S. possession. He said these tubes have far higher specifications than are required for use in rockets, the use claimed by Iraq.

In perhaps his most macabre disclosure, Powell said Hussein’s regime has experimented on human beings since the 1980s “to perfect its biological or chemical weapons.”

Former inspectors said they had heard reports of such experiments in the 1990s but never saw proof. Powell, however, said that 1,600 Iraqi death-row prisoners were transferred in 1995 to a special unit for medical experiments.

“An eyewitness saw prisoners tied down to beds, experiments performed on them, blood oozing around the victims’ mouths, and autopsies performed to confirm the effect” on the prisoners, Powell said.

He added: Hussein’s “inhumanity... has no limits.”