Word: blix
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...reminder that the Pentagon has deployed hundreds of its own personnel to find the banned weapons that had eluded UN inspectors before war. Last weekend, it was announced that the number of U.S. inspectors would be increased to 1,500 - five times the number of deployed by Dr. Hans Blix's UN team. But so far, no "smoking gun" has been found...
...that the quality of their intelligence would lead troops to the illicit stockpiles fairly quickly once U.S. boots were on Iraqi soil. Now they're adjusting the picture: the Pentagon says its soldiers are no more likely to stumble over a weapons cache than top U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix was. "Things were mobile. Things were underground. Things were in tunnels. Things were hidden. Things were dispersed. Now, are we going to find that? No, it's a big country," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week. "The inspectors didn't find anything, and I doubt that we will--what...
...Local officers were authorized to make payments of $2,500 on the spot. "The White House is screaming, 'Find me some WMD,'" says a State Department official, adding that the task is one of many suddenly facing the department. Members of the Administration must feel a new bond with Blix, since they are now the ones arguing that these things take time...
Then there is the political problem. The longer the hunt takes, the Pentagon concedes, the more likely it is that skeptics will charge that whatever is eventually found was planted by the U.S. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Blix said the information the U.S. provided to his teams before the war was "pathetic." So it was not surprising when he said last week, "I think that at some stage they would like to have some credible international verification of what they find," suggesting that if the U.S. ever does uncover something, it will have to call for inspections...
...Reality check: Hans Blix was appointed head of UNMOVIC in 1999. UNMOVIC differed from its predecessor, UNSCOM, in that it hired its own personnel with a budget drawn from the oil-for-food program. UNSCOM had relied on personnel seconded by intelligence services of the UN member states, and the result was that its independence was compromised by officials conducting espionage work on behalf of their own governments. So Blix's appointment and UNMOVIC's staffing policies were a done deal, and were not up for review in the wake of President Bush's address. Curiously, also, President Bush...