Errors May Have Inflated Iraq Arms Claims

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent

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 U.N. 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 "unaccountables" may have been no more than paperwork glitches left behind when Iraq destroyed banned chemical and biological weapons years ago.

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KEY QUOTES:

"What they found was bad accounting."

"It could be true they (Iraq) did destroy unilaterally in 1991 what they hid."

"American officials at times used paperwork gaps to paint an ominous picture. President Bush last October spoke of 'a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions.'"