US: Intelligence photographs of mobile biological weapons vehicles and transcripts of intercepted conversations among Baghdad officials will be presented by the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, to the United Nations tomorrow when he makes the case for war against Iraq, a US official said yesterday.
With the pace quickening towards a military showdown, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency, Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, said yesterday the world was losing patience with Iraq and Baghdad needed to begin co-operating more with UN weapons inspectors.
Dr ElBaradei and the chief UN weapons inspector, Dr Hans Blix, will travel to Baghdad on February 8th for talks with Iraqi officials which offer little more than a glimmer of hope that war can be averted.
Both President Bush and the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, last week dismissed the initiative by Iraq to invite the inspectors back as too late, and repeated that only "complete disarmament" by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would solve the crisis.
The focus returns to the United Nations tomorrow with several foreign ministers arriving in New York for Mr Powell's promised delivery of a dossier of evidence to show Iraq's failure to disarm.
"We will provide evidence concerning the weapons programmes that Iraq is working so hard to hide," Mr Powell wrote in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. There would be no "smoking gun" he said, but "a straightforward, sober and compelling demonstration that Saddam is concealing the evidence of his weapons of mass destruction."
The US has yet to say if it will seek approval for military action in the form of a new security council resolution, as Mr Blair has urged, but Mr Powell wrote yesterday that he would at least seek new unanimity at the UN.
The US "will begin a new round of full and open consultation with our allies about next steps", he stated. "Much has been made of the friction between the US and some of its traditional partners about how to proceed with Iraq.
"We will work to bridge our differences, building on the bedrock of our shared values and long history of acting together to meet common challenges."
France, Russia and China, all with veto power on the 15- member Security Council, have opposed an imminent move to war. However the US is clearly set on exerting intensive pressure on its allies to bend the council to its will, diplomats at the UN said.
A similar process took eight weeks in the autumn before Resolutio1441 renewing inspections was passed, but Washington will this time seek agreement in a much shorter time, as its military is almost ready for invasion and the weather is best suited for desert warfare, diplomatic sources say.
An administration official said the Secretary of State spent yesterday sifting through classified US intelligence to choose what he would make public. The intelligence will be first shown to Congressional leaders in the White House at 7 a.m. tomorrow.
"The US seeks Iraq's peaceful disarmament," Mr Powell said, "but we will not shrink from war if that is the only way to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction."
Dr ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Reuters in an interview yesterday that the consensus at the UN was that Baghdad had to improve its behaviour.
"There is an agreement that Iraq needs to co-operate more, that the international community is getting impatient and that inspectors should be able to provide positive reports soon," he said.
This was the message he and Dr Blix, who is in charge of disarming Iraq of chemical, biological and ballistic weapons, would communicate to the Iraqis when they arrive in Baghdad on Saturday.
Human Rights Watch yesterday called on the Bush administration to respond to allegations that intelligence has been obtained from detainees through torture. It claimed that at least some of the evidence Mr Powell intended to present was derived from interrogations of detainees held by the United States and its allies in the war on terrorism.