Saddam spills out 'the truth' in megabytes

They were laid out, under neon lights, on a rectangular wooden table almost as decorations, gold and green CD-Roms carefully arranged among the paper files bound in plastic, looking for all the world like a stall at a village hall fête.

But there was also the line of nine men in shiny suits, with bulges at the shoulders, the obligatory pictures of Saddam Hussein, in one firing a rifle, and the titles of the 27 files themselves to remind one of the occasion. Each said "Completely Accurate, Full and Complete Declaration of Iraq's..." and then either "chemical", "biological" or "nuclear" programmes.

Speculation about the size of the declarations had risen as the media waited to be given a glimpse of them. At one stage they were rumoured to be 18,000 pages long, then 24,000. The real total was 11,807 pages, plus 352 supplementaries. Of this, 2,363 pages were devoted to nuclear matters, 1,334 to biological, 1,823 to chemical and 6,287 to missiles.

In addition there were CD-Roms with combined 529 megabytes of data. The Iraqis had tried to put everything on paper, in an attempt, cynics say, to tie up the United Nations even more, but in the end they had run out of time.

The Iraqis had wanted the handover of the report to the UN in Baghdad yesterday evening to take place in the full glare of publicity, but the UN had refused. Instead, the international media were asked to meet at the Ministry of Information at 8am to be shown the material at a "secret location". This was later changed to noon.

After two hours and 18 minutes of further delay, there followed one of those mad races, of which both Iraqi officials and the UN appear to be highly fond, through the centre of Baghdad. Bewildered pedestrians dived on to the pavement and other traffic braked violently as a convoy of government and journalists' cars dashed to the offices of the National Monitoring Directorate.

There, in a conference hall, Iraqi officials asked the media to organise themselves into groups which would be taken, one by one, in a "calm, dignified and civilised manner" to a nearby two-storey building in which the report was being displayed.

The result was a rolling mêlée in which Iraqi security guards attempted to stop television cameramen from storming through. A glass door was shattered, and some people suffered cuts and bruises. "I expect when we meet American and British soldiers, they will be better behaved than this," one official said drily.

When the journalists were finally admitted, one of the heavies in a suit waved his arms. "Look, we have completed the report before the UN deadline. Look how open we are. Take photos. Write everything down," he urged. At the same time, Ministry of Information minders were warning: "You have two minutes only, mister." They prevailed.

Afterwards General Hussam Mohammed Amin, the head of the Iraqi liaison group with the UN, declared that the reason the US and Britain had demanded so much detail in so short a time was because they expected Iraq to fail to do so. "But we have proved them wrong," he said. He added that he hoped the delivery of the report would prevent a war, without looking particularly hopeful himself.