Former US arms hunter says no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq

4.45pm


UPDATED REPORT, WASHINGTON - David Kay stepped down as leader of the US hunt for banned weapons in Iraq today and said he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.

In a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which says its invasion of Iraq was justified by the presence of illicit arms, Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found.

"I don't think they existed," Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production programme in the '90s," he said.

The CIA named former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who had expressed his own doubts that unconventional arms would be found in Iraq, to replace Kay.

Kay said he believes most of what was going to be uncovered in Iraq had been found and that the weapons hunt would become more difficult once America returned control of the country to the Iraqis in June.

Top Democrats on the congressional intelligence committees seized on Kay's comments.

"It increasingly appears that our intelligence was wrong about Iraq's weapons, and the administration compounded that mistake by exaggerating the nuclear threat and Iraq's ties to al Qaeda. As a result, the United States is paying a very heavy price," said Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

"Dr Kay's astonishing statement today cannot be ignored. It is increasingly clear that there has been a massive intelligence failure," said Rep. Jane Harman of California, senior Democrat on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

James Rubin, national security adviser for retired General Wesley Clark, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Kay's comments meant "the major premise for urgent war in Iraq has been devastated by the administration's own findings."

No banned arms have been found in Iraq since the United States went to war against Baghdad last year.

In his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, US President George W. Bush insisted that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had actively pursued dangerous weapons programmes right up to the start of the US attack in March.

"Had we failed to act," Bush said, "the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programmes would continue to this day."

And on Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States had not given up on finding banned weapons in Iraq. "The jury is still out," he said in a radio interview.

In response to Kay's remarks, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said today, "We remain confident that the Iraq Survey Group will uncover the truth about Saddam Hussein's regime, the regime's weapons of destruction programmes."

Kay said he left his post due to a "complex set of issues," including a reduction in resources and a change in focus of the Defence Department's Iraq Survey Group, which is conducting the weapons hunt, toward fighting against the insurgency.

"We're not going to find much after June. Once the Iraqis take complete control of the government it is just almost impossible to operate in the way that we operate," Kay said.

"I think we have found probably 85 per cent of what we're going to find," he said. "I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production and that's what we're really talking about."

Kay said Iraq had a "rudimentary" programme to develop nuclear weapons. "It really wasn't dormant because there were a few little things going on, but it had not resumed in anything meaningful," he said.

Kay said he planned to take a private sector job.

Duelfer, 51, a former deputy executive chairman of the UN Special Commission that was responsible for dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, had previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found in Iraq.

But after his new job was announced, Duelfer, who will be based in Iraq as CIA special adviser to direct the WMD search, said he was keeping an open mind and his past comments were made without access to current US intelligence reports.

"This was a spectator sport for me," he told reporters on a conference call. "Maybe there still will be weapons. It's a big country. There's a lot of chaos there. It may well be that something turns up. I don't want to prejudge that, that still may happen."

- REUTERS


Herald Feature: Iraq