UNITED NATIONS, January 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – U.N. chief inspector Hans Blix pressed Iraq Thursday, January 9, to give clarifications about shortcomings in its weapons declaration, with Iraq pledging full cooperation.

U.N. arms inspectors will press Iraq this month for a full list of scientists working on its weapons of mass destruction, and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed El-Baradei El-Baradei said.

"We need a comprehensive list," he told reporters after he and U.N. chief arms inspector Hans Blix briefed the Security Council, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

El-Baradei noted that he and Blix were due to visit Baghdad on January 19-20 and said they would press Iraqi authorities for a full list of names.

Blix said he told the Security Council that a list of names provided by Iraq last month was "inadequate."

In his statement to the Security Council, Blix said that a list provided by Iraq last month contained the names of 117 people working in the chemical sector, 120 in the biological sector and 156 in the missiles sector.

The statement, made available to AFP, noted that this fell short even of lists provided by Iraq to the previous U.N. arms inspectorate, which left the country four years ago.

"We do not feel that the Iraqi side has made a serious effort to respond to the request we made. We shall therefore ask for supplementary information," Blix said.

He noted that if it could be shown that people who were previously working on Iraq's arms programs had been transferred to other sectors, it would add weight to Baghdad's assertion that it had no weapons of mass destruction.

"The efforts we make are thus very far from the spy operation which some Iraqi comments have talked about," Blix said.

Commenting on the Iraqi arms declaration recently handed over to the U.N., Blix told the Security Council that a "more profound reading of the text that we have done confirms the impression" that many questions remain unanswered.

Iraq ready to answer any UN questions on arms declaration

Responding to Blix's statements, Iraq reaffirmed it was ready to answer any questions the United Nations still had about its arms declaration.

"If these questions are relevant, they can be dealt with very positively," Iraq's chief liaison official with the U.N. arms inspectors General Hossam Mohammad Amin told a press conference in Baghdad.

He said Iraq had not to date received any such question on its arms declaration from the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) or IAEA.

"We shall positively deal with these questions and we will (answer) any questions by UNMOVIC and the IAEA to finalize, to resolve any pending issue from their point of view," he said.

Amin also revealed Iraq had written to the U.N. disarmament chiefs to protest the "dubious character" of some of the questions being posed by the inspectors even before President Saddam Hussein accused them of spying.

"We have written to them on January 5," the day before Saddam's broadside against the disarmament mission in an Armed Forces Day speech, the general said.

"I gave examples of where questions were irrelevant to their work," Amin said. "We shall be discussing this" with Blix.

Amin stressed the inspections in Iraq since late November were being carried out "without any restrictions or obstacles" and served to confirm Iraq's insistence it no longer had any banned weapons of mass destruction.

Presidential advisor General Amer al-Saadi announced earlier that Iraq planned to raise its concerns with Blix and El-Baradei when they visit Baghdad on January 19.

But whereas Saadi adopted a more measured tone, conceding that the problem might be down to "oversights" from individual inspectors or plain "ignorance", Amin insisted the inspectors' probing was tantamount to "spying".

He complained that during a December 25 visit to a munitions store, an inspection team had asked about troop numbers, store movements and air defenses, and requested a ground plan.

And during a visit that same day to the Bakir airbase, 100 kilometers north of Baghdad, they had asked whether there were daily fighter flights from the base.

"All these questions have a suspicious nature and we can call it spying as it has nothing to do with the search for weapons of mass destruction," he said.

Amin also disclosed that one U.N. inspector had made an informal verbal request to interview an Iraqi weapons scientist in Cyprus, where UNMOVIC and the IAEA have their rear base.

But he doubted any Iraqi technician would agree to go abroad.

"I think nobody is ready to go outside to make an interview with UNMOVIC or the IAEA," the general said.

Amin stressed that no formal request had been received by the Iraqi side and reiterated Baghdad's position that it was up to individual scientists to agree to interviews or not.

New American accusation against Iraq

The United States on Thursday renewed accusations that Iraq is not complying with U.N. disarmament obligations and warned that Baghdad was on the verge of missing a "historic opportunity" to avoid a war.

U.S. officials accused Baghdad of attempting to deceive the world body by providing "superficial" cooperation with U.N. arms inspectors at best and failing to truthfully account for the status of its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

"What we have here is a failure to cooperate," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher claimed.

Boucher said a list of personnel provided to the U.N. inspectors was incomplete and dated from 1991 and that "much of the other information appears incomplete, inaccurate and recycled."

"The failure of Iraq to cooperate is becoming more and more clear," he alleged.

"Iraq is missing a historic opportunity to comply peacefully and to disarm," Boucher said.

At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer reiterated the U.S. conviction that Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction.

"The problem with guns that are hidden is you can't see their smoke," Fleischer told reporters, adding: "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

U.S. reinforcements pour into Kuwait

U.S. troop reinforcements have arrived in Kuwait to join more than 15,000 already deployed in Iraq's southern neighbor in readiness for any war, the U.S. military said Thursday.

"Troops arrived yesterday," a U.S. army spokesman in Kuwait told AFP, declining to give the size or composition of the forces or specify where they had traveled from.

In Washington, officials said that troops from the 3rd Infantry Division, the largest ground combat unit ordered to the Gulf so far, had begun leaving for Kuwait from their base at Fort Benning, Georgia.

"They in fact are moving right now from Robbins Air Force Base," said Rick Olson, a spokesman at Fort Stewart, Georgia, the division headquarters.

"We're going over there with no further orders other than continue our training," he said.

The 16,500-man mechanized division already has one armored brigade in Kuwait and equipment in place for the other two that are deploying from Georgia.

In addition, division headquarters elements, artillery, engineers, a signals battalion, a military intelligence battalion, an air defense battalion and military police are awaiting movement.

Major General Buford Blount, the division commander, is in Georgia for a visit but has been working out of Kuwait since last month.

Battle planners from U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Florida have been quietly moving to nearby Qatar to man a forward headquarters that would likely be used to run any war, officials said.

Orders to deploy about 25,000 troops to the Gulf went out just before Christmas and additional deployments are under consideration, U.S. officials said.

Around 60,000 were already in the Gulf region, including 16,000 in Kuwait, they said.