United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) was an inspection regime created with the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 in April 1991 to oversee Iraq's compliance with the destruction of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile weapons facilities and to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency's efforts to eliminate nuclear weapon facilities all in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
[3] The commission found corroborating evidence that Rihab Rashid Taha, an Iraqi microbiologist educated in England, had produced biological weapons for Iraq in the 1980s.
[4] Inspectors withdrew in 1998, and disbanded the following year amid allegations that the United States had used the commission's resources to spy on the Iraqi military.
"There were a few things that were peculiar about this animal-feed production plant," Charles Duelfer, UNSCOM's deputy executive chairman, later told reporters, "beginning with the extensive air defenses surrounding it."
The powers given to UNSCOM inspectors in Iraq were: "unrestricted freedom of movement without advance notice in Iraq"; the "right to unimpeded access to any site or facility for the purpose of the on-site inspection...whether such site or facility be above or below ground"; "the right to request, receive, examine, and copy any record data, or information...relevant to" UNSCOM's activities; and the "right to take and analyze samples of any kind as well as to remove and export samples for off-site analysis".
But with the threat of punitive military action looming from the international community, and particularly the U.S., Saddam Hussein begrudgingly allowed UNSCOM's inspectors into the country to begin their work.
687 until June 1992, ten months after deadline, at which time the Iraqi government submitted "full, final and complete reports" on all of its weapons of mass destruction programs.
It was because of the discovery of Taha's work with camel pox that the US and British intelligence services feared Saddam Hussein may have been planning to weaponize the smallpox virus.
UNSCOM learned that, in August 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Taha's team was ordered to set up a program to weaponize the biological agents.
[15] Also in 1996, the Iraqi ruling regime agreed to the terms of United Security Council Resolution 986, an oil-for-supplies agreement in which Iraq was allowed to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months as a ways to purchase supplies for its increasingly impoverished and malnourished population.
This agreement also allowed the UN to oversee the use and management of oil revenues, and to see that some of the funds went to pay war reparations and for the work of UNSCOM in Iraq during this period.
[17] The IAEA report by Mohamed El Baradei stated that Iraq "has provided the necessary level of cooperation to enable... [our] activities to be completed efficiently and effectively".
[18][19] Since Operation Desert Fox had already begun at the time of the meeting (just hours after the inspectors had been evacuated),[20] the Security Council debated about who was to blame for the military action, rather than whether they should authorize it.
[21]The Russian ambassador added: We believe that although there are certain problems..., the current crisis was created artificially... On the night of 15 December this year, [Butler] presented a report that gave a distorted picture of the real state of affairs and concluded that there was a lack of full cooperation on the part of Iraq.
"[24] In December 1999, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1284, replacing UNSCOM with the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, also known as UNMOVIC.
[25] UNSCOM's intention of identifying and eliminating Iraqi weapons programs resulted in numerous successes, illustrating the "value of a system approach to biological arms verification".
[30] An investigation by The Washington Post claimed that CIA engineers, working as UN technicians, installed equipment to spy on Iraqi sites without Butler's knowledge, and that this explained the unidentified "burst transmissions" that had been noted by the inspectors.
Butler, on the other hand, denied allegations that foreign intelligence agencies "piggybacked" UNSCOM and questioned the factual accuracy of several of Ritter's statements.