WASHINGTON, Jan 24: Former chief US arms hunter David Kay has concluded Iraq had no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, a potential embarrassment for President George Bush and ammunition to his election-year Democratic rivals.
Mr Kay, who stepped down from his post on Friday, undercut the White House's public rationale for the invasion of Iraq by saying that he had concluded there were no stockpiles of lethal weapons to be found.
But a senior US official said on Saturday that Vice President Dick Cheney, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, still believed "the jury's still out" on whether Iraq had chemical or biological weapons or missiles, as contained in official US intelligence estimates.
"I don't think they existed," David 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.
"I think we have found probably 85 per cent of what we're going to find," said Mr Kay, who returned from Iraq last month and told the CIA that he would not be going back.
"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.
In his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Bush again insisted that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had actively pursued dangerous weapons programmes right up to the start of the invasion in March.
"Had we failed to act," Mr Bush said, "the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programmes would continue to this day."
The United Nations' top nuclear watchdog said on Saturday he was not surprised at Mr Kay's conclusion. "I am not surprised about this," International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said on the sidelines of the Davos meeting.
"We said already before the war, that there was no evidence of this, so this is really not a surprise."
Mr Kay's statements were certain to reopen debate in the United States - particularly among the field of Democratic candidates vying for the right to take on Mr Bush in November - about the administration's motives for launching the invasion.
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who had ridden an anti-war current to the front of the Democratic pack before falling back in recent days, could get a boost from Mr Kay's conclusions.
The remarks were certain to focus renewed attention on the attack, which critics say was carried out to secure control of Iraq's vast oil riches and relieve Arab pressure on Israel.
In London, David Kay's admission of defeat marked a potential setback.
British Prime Minister Blair's office issued a statement shrugging off his comments. "It is important people are patient and we let the Iraq Survey Group do its work," a spokesman said. "There is still more work to be done and we await the findings of that. But our position is unchanged."
On Friday, the White House stood firm. "We remain confident that the Iraq Survey Group will uncover the truth about Saddam Hussein's regime, the regime's weapons of destruction programmes," spokesman Scott McClellan said.
The CIA announced that former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who has expressed his own doubts that unconventional weapons would be found, would succeed Mr Kay as Washington's chief arms hunter.
Mr Duelfer, 51, a former deputy executive chairman of the UN Special Commission that was responsible for dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found.
But after his new job was announced, he said he was keeping an open mind and his past comments had been made from the sidelines without benefit of seeing the most current US intelligence reports. "This was a spectator sport for me," he said while talking to reporters in a conference call.-Reuters
