Iraq had no WMD, says top US weapons inspector

THE former top US weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday he believes Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before the US-led invasion.

David Kay, who stepped down from his post on Friday, said the challenge for the United States now is to figure out why intelligence indicated that Iraq did have them. "We led this search to find the truth, not to find the weapons. The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist, we've got to deal with that difference and understand why."

Asked whether he feels President George W Bush owes the American people an apology for starting the war on the basis of apparently flawed intelligence, Mr Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people.

"You have to remember 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's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."

Since Mr Kay's resignation on Friday as the top US weapons investigator in Iraq, Mr Kay has said Iraq had no large-scale weapons production programme during the 1990s, after it lost the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and no large numbers of mass destruction weapons were available for "imminent action." Still, "that is not the same thing as saying it was not a serious, imminent threat", he said. "That is a political judgment, not a technical judgment."

Mr Kay's declaration that weapons of mass destruction did not exist before the war puts him in direct contradiction with the official Bush administration position. On Saturday, Mr Bush's spokesman said the administration stood by its assertions that Iraq had banned weapons when US and British forces invaded last March. The spokesman, Scott McClellan, said it was only a matter of time before inspectors find them.

Mr Kay said he believes the American public and politicians have to grapple with the question of whether the Iraqi dictator posed an imminent threat. Given the reality on the ground, some may reach different conclusions than they did before the war, he said.

Mr Kay said he left the position because resources were being shifted from the search for Iraq's arms stockpiles to counter-terrorism and troop protection.

Meanwhile, the US death toll in Iraq climbed yesterday as a soldier died of injuries sustained Saturday when his vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in the oil refinery town of Baiji, north of Baghdad, as troops captured 46 Iraqis in raids near Baquba. The military said a US army helicopter crashed into the Tigris river in the northern city of Mosul while on a rescue mission for a soldier who fell into the river when the boat he was in capsized, killing three Iraqis. "A search for the two pilots is underway," a spokesman said. It was unclear if the crash of the OH-58 Kiowa Warrior was the result of hostile fire.