U.S. arms hunter says no Iraq WMD
Sat 24 January, 2004 02:22
Reuters
"I don't think they existed"
U.S. former weapons inspector David Kay
By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - David Kay has stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for banned weapons in Iraq, saying he does 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 on Friday 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 U.N. 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 Senator John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. 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, U.S. President George W. Bush insisted that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had actively pursued dangerous weapons programmes right up to the start of the U.S. attack in March.