December 23, 2002
Faking It
According to Scotland's Sunday Herald, the U.S. first pulled 8,000 pages out of Iraq's 11,300-page report on weapons before it could be seen by the 10 non-permanent member nations of the UN Security Council, then accused Iraq of "omissions" that constitute a "material breach" of UN resolutions.The Herald said, "Although Powell called the Iraqi dossier a 'catalogue of recycled information and flagrant omissions', the non-permanent members of the security council will have no way of testing the US claims for themselves."
Representatives of Norway were indignant that the country "is being treated like a second-class country," the Herald reports, and goes on to say that "Current and former UN diplomats are said to be livid at what some have called the 'theft' of the Iraqi document by the US. Hans von Sponeck, the former assistant general secretary of the UN and the UN's humanitarian co- ordinator in Iraq until 2000, said: 'This is an outrageous attempt by the US to mislead.'"