US: Former US weapons inspector Mr David Kay said yesterday that the US intelligence community owed President George Bush an explanation as to why no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found in Iraq, writes Conor O'Clery, North America Editor
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, who made the case at the United Nations for toppling Saddam Hussein, meanwhile admitted on Saturday that the Iraq government may not have possessed banned weapons.
Mr Kay's statement has severely undermined the Bush administration's case for war, though a White House spokesman said on Saturday the administration stood by its assertions that Iraq had banned weapons when US and British forces invaded last March and it was only a matter of time before inspectors find them.
Speaking on radio in Washington two days after resigning as head of the US weapon search group, Mr Kay said: "We led this search to find the truth, not to find the weapons. The fact that we found so far (that) the weapons do not exist, we've got to deal with that difference and understand why."
Asked whether he felt Mr Bush owed the American people an explanation for starting the war on the basis that Saddam Hussein had unconventional weapons, Mr Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people. You have to remember that this view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change in the Bush administration. It is not a political 'got you' issue. It is a serious issue of how you could come to the conclusion that is not matched by the future."
Mr Kay said when he resigned that Iraq had no large-scale weapons production programme during the 1990s and no large numbers of WMD available for "imminent action".
Mr Powell has become the first senior figure in the Bush administration to concede that Iraq may not have possessed weapons it claimed.
"The answer to that question is, we don't know yet," Mr Powell told reporters on a trip to Georgia.
US officials had unanswered questions before going to war, he said. "We were not only saying we thought they had them, we had questions that needed to be answered. What was it? One hundred tonnes, 500 tonnes or zero tonnes? Was it so many litres of anthrax, 10 times that amount or nothing? What is the open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?"
Mr Powell also said the Bush administration was not only convinced that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons but was troubled by Saddam Hussein's refusal to answer UN questions. Mr Kay said he believed the American public and politicians now had to grapple with the question of whether the Iraqi dictator posed an imminent threat. CIA Director George Tenet has replaced Mr Kay with Mr Charles Duelfer, the number two weapons inspector for the UN for seven years.