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Is the US acting as a sole superpower by snubbing UN? Post your views

Washington: An American weapons inspector heading a team to Iraq has reported to the US Congress that they have not found any Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in that country, dealing a blow to the US Administration's hopes of substantiating its claim that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs.

However, chief weapons inspector David Kay in his report to the US Congress, said his team of 1,200 experts is still in the middle of an intensive hunt and that there was "substantial evidence" to suggest that Iraq had the intent of producing weapons of mass destruction.

"We have not found at this point actual weapons," Kay said, adding, "We have found substantial evidence of an intent of senior level Iraqi officials, including Saddam, to continue production at some future point in time of weapons of mass destruction."

Kay said his team had found "dozens of WMD-related programme activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002."

On the issue of whether Saddam had been in the process of reviving efforts to develop a nuclear weapons programme, another ground advanced by Bush for going to war without UN backing, Kay said investigators had found no evidence beyond a possible tentative restart "at the very most basic level."

"It clearly does not look like a massive resurgent programme," Kay said on Capitol Hill after briefing lawmakers in private.

There was evidence, however, that Iraq was carrying out "a very full-scale programme" to extend the range of its missiles beyond the permitted distance, Kay said.

Although the team has not found any WMDS, "we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone," Kay said.

On another specific item, mobile trailers that were found after the war and cited as possible evidence of a biological weapons programme, Kay said it is still unclear what they were used for. He cited biological weapons and Helium weather balloons as two possibilities.

On how much time the search would take, Kay said the inspectors needed at least nine more months.

Bush has meanwhile asked the Congress for 600 million dollars for the inspection. Over 300 million dollars have already been spent on the search.

Kay's report had been keenly awaited as six months of post war searching passed without any announced findings that would validate most of Bush's assertions about Iraq's weapons programmes and ties to terrorism.

Already the Administration has started saying that regardless of why Bush went to war, Saddam was an evil man who had to be removed.

Critics have contended that either the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other agencies that make up the US intelligence community made serious errors in their analysis or the Bush administration exaggerated what intelligence information it did have to persuade a skeptical world to support an invasion.

PTI