US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said he expects the US to take weeks to draw conclusions about the 12,000-page arms dossier which Iraq issued in hopes of avoiding war.
UN arms experts hunting for banned weapons fanned out yesterday in the biggest one-day search of their nearly two-week-old mission, while the UN itself came under fire for handing over control to the dossier to Washington.
Rumsfeld, speaking to reporters travelling with him to the Horn of Africa, said US agencies including the CIA and the Pentagon would scrutinize the documents which Iraq turned over to the UN at the weekend.
"The thing to do is to not prejudge it, be patient and expect that it will take days and weeks probably to go over, and come to some judgments about it," Rumsfeld said before his arrival in the Eritrean capital Asmara.
US experts are expected to search for discrepancies between Iraq's disclosures and US intelligence data.
But the US' seizure of the huge arms declaration and its handing out of copies to Britain and France, annoyed other UN Security Council members.
Washington defended its removal of the huge document, saying it was essential to restrict circulation of sensitive details of how Baghdad made weapons of mass destruction to the five permanent members of the Security Council.
But other council members questioned how they could judge US charges that Iraq was lying about its banned weapons programs if they were denied access to the full text of its "currently accurate, full and complete declaration."
And in the Arab world, the US action was branded an "act of piracy."
British and French diplomats said they got copies of Iraq's declaration in Washington at 6.30pm Monday, about 18 hours after a US official took the document -- containing almost 12,000 printed pages and several computer disks -- from the office of UN chief arms inspector Hans Blix.
Diplomats and US officials said on Monday that the US was put in charge of making duplicates for its fellow permanent members of the Security Council on grounds that Washington had the best photocopying capabilities.
US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said copies had to be made "in a controlled environment in order to guard against the inadvertent release of information" -- an assertion backed by the French.
"They were done as quickly as possible and in the requisite conditions of security," a French diplomat said.
It was not immediately clear if China and Russia had also received copies, although council president Alfonso Valdivieso of Colombia said those with special expertise in weapons proliferation would receive the declaration first.
The 10 non-permanent members would be given sanitized versions later.
Valdivieso said he made his decision after consulting other council members, but he did not say whether they had agreed.
"There were no face-to-face consultations, and many members are upset," one council diplomat said.
The only diplomat prepared to protest publicly, Syrian Ambassador Mikhail Wehbe, said the act was "in contradiction with every kind of logic in the Security Council and against the unity of the council."
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