Al Saadi

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• 'VX now a dead issue'
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BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- President Saddam Hussein's top weapons adviser on Tuesday pledged that Iraqi officials would fully cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors, including discussing with chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler a document he has requested.

The document reportedly is a list of bombs dropped during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

A monopoly on the truth? Hear General Amer al Saadi dispute Butler's claim that Iraq is lying to UNSCOM. AIFF or WAV (498 K / 30 sec. audio)

"We took copies of those documents to New York, and we were ready to show them to fair-minded people who would view this as it really is, as an internal paper, not a formal document that gives some facts and figures," Gen. Amer al Saadi said in an interview with CNN.

"We were ready to discuss this with people in New York, but nobody asked us about it at the time," he added.

Would Iraq discuss the document now?

"We are ready to do that -- discuss this question. All relevant figures could be discussed easily. But all nonrelevant items or details, nonrelevant to UNSCOM's mandate and UNSCOM's work, should be excluded, because those constitute information which are sought after by intelligence," he said.

UNSCOM is the acronym for the U.N. Special Commission that oversees the weapons inspectors.

Saadi was hesitant when asked about U.N. inspections of Iraqi presidential sites -- an issue that previously led to tension between the United Nations and Baghdad.

Asked if Iraq would again allow inspections of those sites if inspectors wanted to go there, Saadi responded: "This is hard. We will do our best to cooperate, but naturally there are limits."

On a related issue, Saadi repeated Iraq's explanation that Baghdad had wanted to arm weapons with deadly VX nerve gas but was not able to produce "stabilized VX" that would last long enough to be loaded into weapons.

"VX is now a dead issue," Saadi said. "It is political, really."

"They (U.N. inspectors) know very well we don't have the stabilizer, and the VX we produced was without stabilizer and did not last long and therefore it was not fit to be weaponized," Saadi said. "We would have weaponized it. Why do we produce VX, if we didn't have the intention to weaponize it?"

However, Butler has told CNN that there are still significant gaps in UNSCOM's inspections of Iraq's biological-weapons program, and that Baghdad has not provided all the relevant data yet.

Correspondent Jane Arraf contributed to this report.