Tue December 3, 2002 07:32 AM ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq will hand in a key declaration on its military programs on Dec. 7, a senior Iraqi official said Tuesday. But he again denied that Baghdad had any weapons of mass destruction.

Hussam Mohammed Amin, the chief Iraqi official liaising with U.N. arms experts, told reporters who asked if the declaration would contain any new elements:

"Of course the declaration will have new elements but these new elements will not, shall we say, necessarily include a declaration of the presence of weapons of mass destruction."

He repeated Iraq's standard denial that it has any such weapons.

"We are a country devoid of weapons of mass destruction. This fact is known to all countries including the United States of America and Britain and all those concerned," Amin, head of the Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate, said.

"We are going to deliver this declaration in the proper time on the seventh of this month," he said, adding that it would be transmitted to the United Nations by U.N. arms inspectors and experts of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

President Bush said Monday Iraq must supply a "credible and complete" list of its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons by the December 8 deadline set by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 giving Baghdad one last chance to disarm.

U.N. arms inspectors searched one of President Saddam Hussein's lavish palace compounds in Baghdad Tuesday in the biggest test of Iraqi cooperation since inspections for weapons of mass destruction resumed.

U.N. experts returned to Baghdad last month.

In a swoop on a suspect sites Monday, they said they had discovered some equipment tagged by previous inspection teams and several U.N. monitoring cameras had gone missing from a missile factory.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 2002

Answers

Hmmm. Over on TB2k someone posted a short note about a friend that had just returned from Afghanistan saying watch dec 8th, but he didn't have any details and the friend was just repeating what he had been told in Afghanistan by co-workers.

http://66.133.153.43/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=50051

-- Anonymous, December 03, 2002

Yes, I heard this morning on the news that Iraq thinks it will have its homework assignment ready on December 7th, and no, they didn't remind us that that date is.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 2002

You know how the Arabs love dates, and not just the medjool dates. Of course, with the Arab mind, you never know if they're doing it just to cause us concern or if they're going to pull some big stunt-- or if they're coordinating with AQ.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 2002