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Weapons hunter quits says doubts they exist Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/01/24/us_weapons_hunter_quits_says_he_doubts_they_exist/http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/01/24/us_weapons_hunter_quits_says_he_doubts_they_exist/
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US weapons hunter quits, says he doubts they exist
By Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters, 1/24/2004
WASHINGTON -- David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the US hunt for banned weapons in Iraq yesterday, 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 said 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 program in the '90s," he said.
The CIA announced earlier that former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who has expressed his own doubts that unconventional weapons would be found, would succeed Kay as Washington's chief arms hunter.
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.
The United States went to war against Baghdad last year citing a threat from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. So far, no banned arms have been found.
In his annual State of the Union address Tuesday, President Bush insisted that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had actively pursued dangerous weapons programs 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 programs would continue to this day."
On Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States had not given up on finding unconventional weapons in Iraq. "The jury is still out," he said in an interview with National Public Radio.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, responding to Kay's remarks, said: "We remain confident that the Iraq Survey Group will uncover the truth about Saddam Hussein's regime, the regime's weapons of destruction programs."
Kay said he left his post because of a "complex set of issues," including a reduction in resources and a change in focus of the Defense Department's Iraq Survey Group, which is conducting the weapons hunt.
ISG analysts were diverted from hunting for weapons of mass destruction to helping in the fight against the insurgency, he said. "When I had started out I had made it a condition that ISG be exclusively focused on WMD. That's no longer so."
"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 percent 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 he was going back to the private sector.
In a statement announcing Kay's departure, CIA Director George Tenet praised Kay for his "extraordinary service under dangerous and difficult circumstances."
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.
"I think that Mr. Kay and his team have looked very hard. I think the reason that they haven't found them is they're probably not there," Duelfer told NBC television earlier this month.
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 had been made without the benefit of seeing the most current US intelligence reports.
"This was a spectator sport for me," he told reporters in a conference call yesterday.
"We'll see, I mean we don't know what the answers are. 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," he said.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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