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MElB: I think, as Dr. Blix mentioned, it was a very good meeting with the Council today. We reported that we are inching forward with implementation of our tasks. We are getting access to all the sites, however both of us also indicated that we need more proactive support on the part of Iraq; to be able to move quickly to implement our mandate. We also indicated that we need more actionable information on the part of governments and we committed ourselves to intensify the process so we can achieve the results intended as soon as we can. We will provide an update report on the 27th of this month, however that report, we should emphasize, is an update report, it is not a final report, it is work in progress, and this simply would register where we are on the 27th of January, but we obviously [will] continue our work afterward and we still have a lot of work to do.
Q: You say you haven't found a "smoking gun". You also said that the Iraqis are being cooperative. You also say the Security Council is being helpful. Aren't you just sitting on the fence and trying to keep people happy all around?
HB: No, I would say that the Declaration didn't provide us any new evidence and they didn't answer the questions that were put already in 1999 by the Amorim report, and that the Iraqis could have looked at those questions and could have answered better. So we are not satisfied.
Q: …that you are not a defection agency, you are not a refugee agency, you are not in anybody's pocket. How are you going to deal with the pressure that is being exerted on you to interview Iraqi scientists outside Iraq. Time Magazine has already issued an article saying that you will look into this in a few days. You don't seem to be warm to the idea, you seem to see practical and legal, are you going to implement this? I know the choice is there, the option is there, are you going to move on it, or are you going to just…?
HB: Are you trying to increase the pressure further?
Let me say that about interviews, and Mohamed and I are agreed on our view on this, that interviews have been in the past and remain a very useful source of information. We do carry out a lot of interviews as we go into installations, whether military or civilian, whatever, we carry out a lot of interviews and we get a lot of information. And frequently minders are present. Interviews with minders present are not useless, they were not in the past, and they are not useless now. However, Iraq is a totalitarian country, and we do not want to have interviews where people are intimidated, that happened in the past. That was why the Resolution 1441 stated explicitly that we should have the right to carry out the interviews in private or take people outside. We are ready to use the options we can, and at the same time we cannot force any individual to speak if he doesn't accept that. We cannot force anybody to go abroad or force them to defect. The feel of course is that people's will, people's answers to us may be influenced by fears they have. So we would like to exercise all these options, and we will already next week, for our part, we will ask for some interviews in Baghdad, I can tell you.
MElB: I told the Council today that we were not able, for example, to have interviews in Iraq in private, and that does not indicate the proactive cooperation we expect from Iraq. I made it clear, and I think Dr. Blix shares this view, that if Iraq is willing to show cooperation, we should be allowed to do private interviews inside Iraq. We are also, of course, of the view that should we identify people who we would like to interview out of Iraq we will exercise that right. We would like however to continue to work on the practical arrangements to ensure that we have the right people, that these people are ready to be interviewed abroad, and we [inaudible] arrangements which would ensure their security outside should they decide to stay abroad or if they decide to go back to Iraq. So we will exercise fully our right under the Resolution.
Q: The list of experts that was provided by Iraq. I am wondering, could you be more specific about why you think this list is inadequate? Have you, or are you going to back to Iraq with a direct petition for more information, and have you asked the Council for help to improve this [inaudible]
HB: Oh, I think we can ask the questions all by ourselves. And we intend to do so.
ElB: We are going there on the 19th and 20th of this month, and we have a list of questions we need to press on the Iraqis, and the list of scientists is clearly one of these - we need to impress on the Iraqis that we need a comprehensive list of scientists.
HB: The list even failed to comprise a number of names that we have from the UNSCOM archives and which should have been there. So it was not an adequate list and we will bring it up in our talks in Baghdad.
Q: You said that you need proactive support from Iraq, yet you have also said that has left a lot of important questions unanswered, about chemical and biological weapons. Now, how much time, for example, do you think is reasonable to give Iraq to comply with these [inaudible] requests for information, and do you consider perhaps this trip to Baghdad next week, as maybe a last-ditch effort to get these answers? Or do you expect to have an open slate; maybe give them a month or two?
HB: This is entirely in the hands of the Security Council. The history of inspections and disarmament in Iraq did not begin with Resolution 1441, nor does it necessarily end on the 27th of January. It is for the members of the Council to decide where they will go. We were set up on Resolution 1284 of 1999 and that has a timetable of its own, and our next regular quarterly report will be on the first of March.
Q: On that question, they would defer to you, i.e. how long you need before non proactivity is considered a breach.
HB: No. I don't think that it refers to us. I think that it is for the Council to decide what patience they have.
MElB: We report to the Council. We give them a full account of where we are. The political evaluation of whether that's enough and what needs to be done next is really the prerogative of the Security Council.
Q: Do you have any information from Council members regarding the Iraq's mass destruction programme?
HB: Yes, there were some questions raised about destruction and we both answered that. The guidelines are given in Resolution 687 of 1991, and the instruction is - we are ordered to ensure destruction of items which were weapons of mass destruction or related to them, or missiles of a range of more than 150 kilometres. Now, we know of course that Iraq imports things outside the oil-for-food programme, and these are then in violation of the resolutions, but they not subject to this rule from 1991, about destruction. Sometimes it can be difficult to decide whether an item falls within one category or the other, and that is something we are pondering in some current cases. Next question.
Q: Do you have to go back to the Security Council after the 27th of January to be able to follow up on your work and give assessments?
HB: We are certainly here, under 1284, and they [the IAEA] are there since the sixties.
Q: What are the Iraqis telling you? Are they telling you that they have unilaterally destroyed a lot of these old documents, or old weapons? Also, the U.S., in the Desert Fox campaign, "a successful campaign" as the U.S. called it, were successful in destroying these documents or these weapons programmes. What are they telling you, and what do you think of what they are telling you?
ElB: What they say is that they have no records of destruction. And we have told them that, if you cannot produce documents at least you should be able to produce people who have participated in that destruction process, or at least provide residues of the items that were destroyed. So, we cannot just simply take their word for it that this item has been destroyed and we do not have a document, because then we cannot provide the Council with any degree of certainty that that item has been destroyed. That is what we have been saying. There are a lot of open questions in that fashion and unless the Iraqis come forward with convincing evidence, then this question will continue to remain open and the Council will, in our judgement, will not come to closure on these issues.
Q: On the question of aluminium tubes, what have you told the Council? This is obviously something the U.S. is very interested in - are they being used for uranium enrichment. What have you told the Council?
MElB: We told the Council that we have been investigating Iraqi reports that they have imported aluminium tubes for rockets and not for centrifuge, not for uranium enrichment. We are investigating their efforts to procure aluminium tubes. We are in touch with some of their intended suppliers, and the question is still open, but we believe, at this stage, that these aluminium tubes were intended for the manufacturing of rockets.
Q: Dr. ElBaradei, you mentioned the problem of the missing HMX. Could you give us an indication of what that does and what your concern is, what role this plays in the weapons programme?
MElB: Well, the HMX are high explosives. We are now going through the material balance of what we know existed in Iraq with regard to the HMX. They have told us that some of the HMX material has been used in cement mines and we are going now through the accounting of all the HMX material in Iraq before we come to a conclusion. So, it is an ongoing process.
Q: In a nuclear device, what role does HMX have?
MElB: Well, high explosive of course can be used for detonating a nuclear weapon.