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No, not Enron, Worldcom, or even Martha Stewart. The absurd notion that the Iraqis had neat, tidy, double-entry bookkeeping for all their WMD is finally being debunked.

'Unaccounted For' Iraqi Weapons May Be Bookkeeping Glitches, Ex-Inspectors Say - from Tampa Bay Online: "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.

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.

"Under that sort of regime, you don't admit you got it wrong," said Ron G. Manley of Britain, a former chief U.N. adviser on chemical weapons.

His encounters with Iraqi scientists in the 1990s convinced him that at times, when told to produce "X amount" of a weapons agent, "they wrote down what their superiors wanted to hear instead of the reality," said Manley, who noted that producing VX nerve agent, for example, is a difficult process.

There's plenty of evidence that their recordkeeping was full of error and outright fraud.

Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix, as he left his post this summer, became more open in discussing discrepancies.

After the mid-1990s, "hardly ever did (inspectors) find hidden weapons," Blix reminded one audience. "What they found was bad accounting.

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

The discrepancies, disputed for years between U.N. inspectors and Iraqi officials, may be of more interest now that U.S. weapons hunters are failing to find Iraqi chemical or biological arms.
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Some of the "bad" accounting on the final U.N. list of unresolved disarmament issues:

• Although U.N. inspectors in the 1990s verified destruction of 760 tons of Iraqi chemical warfare agents, including 2.5 tons of VX nerve gas, Iraq never came up with convincing evidence for its claim that it had eliminated a final, additional 1.5 tons of VX.
• A discrepancy between Iraqi documents left open the possibility Baghdad's military retained 6,526 more chemical-filled bombs from the 1980s than inspectors first thought.
• The amount of biological growth medium obtained by Iraq suggested it was capable of producing thousands of liters more anthrax than the 8,900 liters it acknowledged.

Earlier this year, U.N. teams were working with Baghdad to pin down such loose ends. The Iraqis had begun scientific soil sampling, for example, to try to confirm the amount of VX dumped long ago at a neutralization site, and had filed an initial report on March 17. Three days later, however, the U.S. invasion intervened.

Some such efforts had taken on a "for-the-record" character since, experts note, any old VX or "wet" anthrax, for example, would have degraded into ineffectiveness anyway.

So now perhaps we know the real reason for Bush's urgency in attacking: if he had waited longer, it might have been completely clear to everyone that we were being sold a bill of goods.

And, you know, it's not like we keep track of everything down to the ounce, either....

In perhaps the most striking example, U.S. government auditors found in 1994 that almost three tons of plutonium, enough for hundreds of nuclear bombs, had "vanished" from U.S. stocks, because of discrepancies between "book inventory" and "physical inventory."