Word: unscom
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...TIME: UNMOVIC relies on UN member states for intelligence. But cooperation with intelligence agencies hostile to Iraq bedeviled the previous inspection regime, UNSCOM. Will the relationship with intelligence agencies be handled differently this time around...
...Although not going into detail about what happened in the past, it seems clear to me that the UNSCOM lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the world by [having] too close a relationship with the intelligence agencies, and by being too heavily influenced by governments. UNSCOM was dependent, for its activities, on voluntary contributions of personnel, equipment and intelligence. Former members of UNSCOM have described a number of things that came to discredit them. World opinion, not only Arab opinion but world opinion turned in favor of the Iraqis and against UNSCOM at a time when UNSCOM was trying...
Headed by legal expert and former atomic-agency director Hans Blix, UNMOVIC was authorized under softer terms after the former U.N. inspection team, UNSCOM, was barred from Iraq in December 1998. Since then, Blix has assembled 220 experts from 45 countries: 80 at a time will work from Baghdad using five helicopters. Personnel include military specialists, biochemists and engineers, all seconded to U.N. employ and financed by a tax on Iraq's U.N.-run oil-for-food program...
CHEMICAL Although an extensive arsenal, including 690 tons of a chemical weapons agent, was destroyed by UNSCOM, Iraq may still have a stockpile of chemical-weapons munitions and the ingredients to produce weaponized mustard gas, VX and other nerve agents...
NOTE: Most of the information on Iraqi chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons production comes from intelligence gleaned from weapons inspections that essentially ended with the expulsion of UNSCOM inspectors in November...