The State Department said the program was aimed at keeping those scientists from selling their expertise to terrorist groups or rogue states and assisting the reconstruction of Iraq's shattered infrastructure and technology sector.

"This is a program to put people to work to give them more productive uses of their expertise, their intelligence and their energy, than work on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs," spokesman Richard Boucher said.

It is not, he said, intended to pay Iraqi scientists for providing evidence that Saddam's ousted regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Under the program, which is similar to schemes initiated with scientists from the former Soviet Union, the department will spend two million dollars to establish an office in Baghdad, identify those eligible and point out possible projects for them to work on, he said.

Those aspects of the program -- which will include workshops, training and preliminary work on a desalination plant -- is expected to begin in February, Boucher said.

An additional 20 million dollars is envisioned to be spent over the course of the program on stipends for the scientists and other expenses but the exact funding mechanism for that money has not yet been determined he said.

"Over the next two years, the Iraqi International Center for Science and Industry will work closely with the Iraqi government to identify, develop and fund activities in support of Iraqi reconstruction," Boucher said.

"Of fundamental importance will be the need to provide meaningful civilian employment in a democratic Iraq to Iraqis who might have worked on weapons of mass destruction programs," he told reporters.

Boucher said that "hundreds" of Iraqi scientists were believed to be eligible for the program.

He could not say what exactly might disqualify an individual but stressed the program was not intended to be "political" and that weapons scientists, as long as they had not actually used the arms they produced, could participate.

"We're looking at scientists and technicians here, not politicians, not political people," Boucher.

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