IAEA team back to Iraq as U.S., U.K. arms experts have found none of Iraq’s alleged WMDs

BAGHDAD, June 7 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – As the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq put the U.S. and U.K. credibility on line, U.N. arms experts are set Saturday, June 7, to begin inspection of a plundered nuclear plant.

The seven inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) arrived Friday, June 6, as international debate swirled around the use of Iraqi weapons as a justification for war, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The IAEA team has the two-week mission of determining if refined uranium ore is missing from Iraq's largest nuclear complex at Tuwaitha near Baghdad.

It is so far the only team of inspectors allowed into Iraq since U.N. inspectors were withdrawn shortly before the war began.

On Thursday, June 5, Chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix publicly questioned the credibility of the U.S.-led arms experts charged with searching out Iraq's arsenal.

With the debate over Iraq's weapons raging on in London and Washington, Blix pressed the U.N. Security Council on Thursday to allow his inspectors back into Iraq to restart searches.

"I do not want to question the integrity or the professionalism of the inspectors of the coalition, but anybody who functions under an army of occupation cannot have the same credibility as an independent inspector," Blix told reporters.

On Friday, Blix told the BBC that he had been disappointed by U.S. and British intelligence his team received in the weeks before the war.

"I thought, 'My God, if this is the best intelligence they have and we find nothing, what about the rest?'"

Controversy has been raging over whether the United States and Britain fudged the data to back up their claims about those weapons, which were cited as the main reason for the war but have not been found inside the country.

A U.S. defense official confirmed on Friday that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had reported before the war it had "no reliable information" that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons.

‘Ask U.S., U.K. Intelligence’

Meanwhile, Australian Prime Minister John Howard on Saturday denied his government doctored intelligence about WMDs in Iraq, saying it relied on intelligence from the United States and Britain.

As debate rages worldwide questioning whether intelligence information was manipulated in order to justify the war, Howard said Australia had relied on the word of it allies before becoming involved.

"There was no doctoring of intelligence advice by the government I lead," Howard told the Liberal Party's national convention in Adelaide.

"The advice was ... carefully based on the information that properly flowed to the Australian intelligence agency by virtue of the very close intelligence links we have with the United States and the United Kingdom."

Howard, nevertheless, remained confident WMDs would be found in the war-scarred country. 

"I remain of the view that there will be evidence ultimately emerging of weapons of mass destruction to which we referred before the war started," he said.

Australia has sent a small team to Iraq to join 1,200 U.S. and British experts searching for WMDs.

The administration of President George W. Bush has been under increasing pressure to explain why none of the WMDs Iraq had not been found in the eight weeks since the end of the war despite intensive searches of suspect sites.

Congressional panels, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, are to hold hearings to clarify the Iraqi WMD mystery and also to establish whether there had been political pressure on CIA analysts, the AFP said.