No trace of WMD in Iraq: Chief inspector

The man who led the search for banned weapons in Iraq has said that he found no evidence that Iraq had chemical or biological stockpiles – not even small ones.

Under questioning by Senate Democrats in Washington, David Kay also offered doubts about Bush administration claims that trailers and aluminium tubes were intended for weapons of mass destruction.

He said UN inspections, belittled by the administration, “achieved quite a bit”.

But Kay agreed with Republican senators that there was no doubt deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had ambitions to use such weapons and that he had used such weapons in the past.

Kay said Saddam had secret weapons development programmes that violated UN resolutions, and that the world was much safer without his government in place.

“I have said I actually think this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Kay, a former chief UN nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq, resigned on Friday from his position as the CIA’s special adviser for the weapons search, citing a decision to reduce reources for the search.

At the hearing and in recent interviews, Kay said he found no evidence that Saddam possessed the banned weapons in recent years.

Bush’s public rationale for going to war was based mostly on claims that Iraq’s stockpile of weapons posed a clear threat to the United States and others.

Questioned by Republican Senator John McCain, Kay said he believed an outside inquiry would be important to see why intelligence failed and how it could be improved.

At the hearing, Kay said he did not think analysts were pressured to shape evidence to make the case for war. “I deeply think that is the wrong explanation,” Kay said.

Kay described a broad intelligence failure on Iraq. “We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” he said.

He blamed a lack of human spying inside Iraq and inadequate money for US intelligence agencies. He also said he believed analysts had been asked to read too much into limited data and depended too much on data provided by UN inspectors.

Kay agreed with the committee chairman, Republican Senator John Warner, that because Iraq was so large, there’s a “theoretical possibility” that banned weapons could still turn up somewhere.