In Baghdad, Charges Draw Anger, Scorn

Rather than a smoking gun, it was all just smoke and mirrors, Iraqi officials charged Wednesday in their first rebuttal in Baghdad to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s indictment of Saddam Hussein.

Gen. Amir Saadi heaped scorn on Powell’s speech to the Security Council, portraying it as a mishmash of new and old allegations that were either untrue or had already been answered by Iraq.

“This was a typical American show -- complete with stunts and special effects,” said Saadi, a presidential advisor on the weapons inspection issue. “What we heard today was for the general public and mainly the uninformed, in order to influence their opinion and to commit the aggression on Iraq.”

Saadi said that a more detailed point-by-point rebuttal would be made by Iraq tonight. But Iraq appeared determined to cast enough doubt on the U.S. evidence, and enough aspersions on U.S. motives, to prevent its own citizens and its supporters in the Arab world and beyond from being swayed by the American effort.

Saadi said the United States should have provided its information and suspicions to the U.N. inspection teams for analysis rather than presenting them in the speech, accusing the U.S. of undermining the work being done by the monitors. He went so far as to charge that the United States was in violation of the Security Council’s Resolution 1441, which he said demands that all countries turn over relevant intelligence to the council.

U.S. satellite photos “prove nothing,” Saadi said. As for the telephone intercepts Powell played, he called them a fabrication that could have been done by any “third-rate intelligence outfit.” And he labeled U.S. charges that Iraq had forged false death certificates for some of its scientists patently “ridiculous. It is below the level of a country leading the world to come up with such ideas.”

Regarding one of the main planks of Powell’s argument -- that Iraq has failed to show that it has indeed destroyed all the weapons it has admitted to having and that inconsistencies and questions surround its past reports -- Saadi said Iraq stands ready to address all the question marks in further talks with the inspectors.

He said Powell had “exaggerated their volume and significance to an unrecognizable measure ... in order to portray Iraq as being a threat to international peace and security.”

Saadi, accompanied at the nighttime news conference by Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, chief liaison to the U.N. arms inspectors, also denied Powell’s allegation that Saadi has personally led a massive effort to conceal Iraqi weapons programs from the monitors.

“Absolute nonsense. Simply not true,” Saadi said in response to a question. “The order given to me from early on was to tell everything as it was.”

Iraqi authorities had been preparing for Powell’s speech in New York, recognizing it as a key step in the U.S. effort to win U.N. approval of a possible attack on Iraq.

Although Western news channels are not normally available in Iraq, large-screen televisions were set up here in a large, open hall of the Information Ministry, and hundreds of journalists and dozens of foreign peace activists in the Iraqi capital were invited in to watch the speech live. But Powell’s presentation wasn’t carried by Iraqi state television.

Information Ministry employees watched Powell with rapt attention as he laid out the U.S. case against Iraq and Hussein.

About two hours later, Saadi and Amin arrived to lead Iraq’s counterattack.

Saadi was especially scornful of audiotapes of what Powell said were intercepted phone conversations between Iraqi military officers. One was a purported discussion about hiding prohibited vehicles from inspectors. Another dealt with removing a reference to nerve agents from documents.

The tapes were simply concocted by U.S. intelligence, he charged. “We have nothing to hide,” he said. “Therefore, we do not talk about hiding anything.”

Saadi said Powell’s theme of a conspiracy of concealment by Iraq is a myth embraced by the U.S. government that has never been proved. He challenged the U.S. government to let the inspectors go on with their work and not to “cast doubts on their credibility.”

Of Powell’s suggestion that Iraq ordered the evacuation of “proscribed materials” from presidential palaces, Saadi said the inspectors visited the palaces in question, took copious samples and slides, and “found no trace of anything” with all their sophisticated equipment.

Saadi was also dismissive of the charge that documents found in a nuclear scientist’s house constitute proof that evidence of ongoing weapons programs is being secreted to private homes and other places where the inspectors are unlikely to find them. He said that chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix had “jumped to a conclusion” about the trove and that the main document was actually an academic paper the scientist had already made available to inspectors.

He defended Iraq’s refusal thus far to allow overflights of its territory by U-2 spy planes on grounds that Iraq could not be responsible for the planes’ safety if U.S. and British fighter jets continue to patrol the skies above northern and southern Iraq to enforce “no-fly” zones there. Iraq wants the patrols suspended for the duration of the proposed U-2 flights, but the United States and Britain have not offered to do so.