Grasping at Straws

UNMOVIC made it's quarterly report on Iraq at the end of May, and on June 9th acting executive chairman Demetrius Perricos made a report to the Security Council, as far as I can tell. Global Security has a copy of the report from the 28th. Mark Noonan of B4B says:

In our national event of yesterday, this news item probably didn't create as much as stir as it normally would have, but it seems that even the UN is acknowledging (a) the existence of WMD in Saddam's Iraq just before the liberation and (b) that Saddam dismantled and/or moved the WMD in Iraq before and during the liberation, and it appears that more of it has been moved since Saddam's regime was toppled.

He then quotes this passage from World Tribune:

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission briefed the Security Council on new findings that could help trace the whereabouts of Saddam's missile and WMD program.

The briefing contained satellite photographs that demonstrated the speed with which Saddam dismantled his missile and WMD sites before and during the war. Council members were shown photographs of a ballistic missile site outside Baghdad in May 2003, and then saw a satellite image of the same location in February 2004, in which facilities had disappeared.

Now, we don't have a transcript of the meeting, which would give us a better idea of what Perricos actually said, but we have the quarterly report and his briefing should not be markedly different. Plus, much of the article's claims are found in the report. Here's the UN report:

In addition, the Commission is aware from comparative analysis of recent satellite imagery that a number of sites previously known to have contained equipment and materials subject to monitoring have been either cleaned out or destroyed. An example of such imagery is provided in the appendix to the present report. It is not known whether such equipment and materials were still present at the sites during the time of coalition action in March and April of 2003. However, it is possible that some of the materials may have been removed from Iraq by looters of sites and sold as scrap.

So, in contrast to WT claim, they don't know, unless they figured it out in under two weeks, which is very unlikely. And this is monitored material, stuff we knew about. The rest of the WT article is pretty benign, mostly reporting the removal of dual-use material from sites in Iraq. There's this passage:

UN inspectors have assessed that the SA-2 and the short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missile were shipped abroad by agents of the Saddam regime. Buchanan said UNMOVIC plans to inspect other sites, including in Turkey.

The report makes no such claims and they've found only SA-2 engines, not actual missiles.

The report also deals with UNMOVIC's progress in determining what Saddam procured from 1999 to 2002, when inspectors were absent. The report makes this statement:

In general, from 1999 to 2002 Iraq procured a variety of dual-use biological and chemical items and materials, including chemicals, equipment and spare parts. To date, UNMOVIC has found no evidence that these were used for proscribed chemical or biological weapon purposes. Although some of the goods may have been acquired by Iraq outside the framework of mechanisms established under Security Council resolutions, most of them were later declared by Iraq to UNMOVIC in its semi-annual monitoring declarations.

The investigation is still underway, obviously, and evidence may yet be discovered, but Noonan's claims are obviously inaccurate.