Iraq on Sunday accused US Vice President Dick Cheney of telling lies in his allegations that Iraq has acquired nuclear weapons, asserting that Iraq has long been cleared of such weapons, the official Iraqi News Agency reported.
"The US administration is still repeating the lies about Iraq without any tangible evidence and these allegations are aimed to lie to the American and international public opinion," an Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement commenting on Cheney Thursday's speech.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney said at a gathering of the Korean War veterans on Thursday in San Antonio, Texas.
Cheney was making out a case for the United States to achieve a "regime change" in Iraq by possibly resorting to military means.
The spokesman accused the United States of trying to "fabricate false evidences to convince the world with its evil intentions against Palestine, Iraq and the Arab and muslim world."
He asserted that Iraq has always abided by its commitments to UN Security Council resolutions and there is no evidence that Iraq is developing nuclear weapons programs.
"Inspection teams of the UN special commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which worked in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, could not find any evidence for these allegations, although they had carried out 13,548 inspections all over Iraq," the spokesman said.
"The American reconnaissance planes carried out 443 inspecting flights and the helicopters of the special commission carried out 980 more, but all that produced no evidences," he added.
He confirmed that IAEA has assured since 1992 that Iraq's nuclear weapons programs have been terminated as representatives from the organization are still visiting Iraq annually.
Iraq has been under sweeping UN sanctions since its August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the embargo will not be lifted until the United Nations has verified that Iraq has eliminated all of its weapons of mass destruction.
Continuous spats about alleged espionage activities between Iraqand the UN arms inspectors led to the crisis in 1997 and 1998, and eventually the inspectors left Iraq on the eve of the US-British airstrike against Baghdad on Dec. 16-19, 1998.
Iraq has since barred the UN arms inspectors from returning to the country, arguing that its weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, chemical and biological ones -- have already been dismantled and thus the return of the inspectors is unnecessary.
(Xinhua News Agency September 2, 2002)
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