Deal to give U.S. report criticized

UNITED NATIONS -- Facing criticism from the U.N. secretary-general and several Security Council members, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on Wednesday defended a deal the United States initiated to take possession of Iraq's weapons declaration and spirit it to Washington.

Ambassador John Negroponte told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the Bush administration's aim was to provide expertise to help U.N. weapons inspectors and council members "in making as expeditious as possible an analysis of the Iraqi declaration."

All 15 Security Council members had agreed Friday that before any member nations saw the report, U.N. inspectors would read the 12,000-page declaration and eliminate material that could be used to promote the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

But the United States changed its mind and lobbied to get the entire uncensored document in the hands of the five permanent members -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France -- who are all nuclear powers.

Late Sunday, Colombia's U.N. ambassador, Alfonso Valdivieso, the current council president, agreed to the U.S. proposal. The decision, taken without a meeting of the council, angered some council members.

By 2 a.m. Monday, the document had been flown by helicopter to Washington, where translators and analysts started working, Negroponte told the BBC.

Diplomats said the Bush administration scanned the declaration, put it on discs, and provided them to the other permanent members. The original was returned early Tuesday to the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in New York.

The 10 nonpermanent members of the Security Council, who are elected for two-year terms and have no veto power, will get only a censored version. Several, including Syria, Mexico and Norway, were unhappy, and Syria said it would make "a very strong protest" to the council.

"We found it very strange, very unnormal that such an action by the president was taken," said Syria's deputy U.N. ambassador, Fayssal Mekdad. "Everybody knows that more than serious pressure was exercised on the president and other members of the council.

"We think that many members of the council have sympathized with the Syrian position. They know very well what was done was a grave violation of the procedures of the council, something which has never taken place. ... This is a material breach of the resolution," he said.

In Baghdad, Iraqi officials called it "unprecedented extortion."

But Secretary-General Kofi Annan insisted Wednesday that "the council is united and they are working together."

"They are not divided, and everybody agreed that in substance the decision was right," he told the Associated Press. "But the form is what some of them were worried about, and it was unfortunate, and I hope this doesn't happen again."

Also...

INSPECTORS SAY SITE IS DORMANT: A strengthened corps of U.N. inspectors in Baghdad, broadened its scrutiny of Iraq's military-industrial complex Wednesday, probing deeper into a nuclear research center and a desert uranium mine, and making a spot inspection of a new missile factory. At one site where Iraq once sought to enrich uranium to nuclear bomb quality, inspectors verified that nuclear activities have not been revived.

POLL: THEY'RE LIARS, BE PATIENT: An overwhelming majority of people in the United States, 91 percent, say they do not believe Iraq gave a full and accurate accounting of all weapons of mass destruction in a weekend report to the United Nations, a survey released Wednesday says.

But the public wants the United States to be patient. The CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll showed 66 percent want the United States to wait for U.N. inspectors to find evidence of such weapons before deciding to invade Iraq.

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