IRAQI WMD

Globe and mail: 'Unaccounted for' Iraqi weapons may be bookkeeping glitches

New York — No weapons of mass destruction have turned up in Iraq, nor has any solid new evidence for them turned up in Washington or London.

But what about Baghdad's patchy bookkeeping — the gaps that led United Nations inspectors to list Iraqi nerve agents and bioweapons material as unaccounted for?

Ex-inspectors now say, five months after the U.S. invasion, that the notorious "unaccountables" may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.

Some may represent miscounts, they say, and some may stem from Iraqi underlings' efforts to satisfy the boss by exaggerating reports on arms output in the 1980s.