Kay: Iraq search team making significant finds

Discoveries include banned equipment, but no WMDs

Sunday, October 5, 2003 Posted: 2255 GMT ( 6:55 AM HKT) 



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Although no weapons of mass destruction have 
been found by U.S. inspectors searching Iraq, Saddam Hussein's 
government was hiding prohibited equipment, laboratories and other 
activities of concern to those fighting terrorism, the leader of the U.S. 
search team said Sunday. 

David Kay said Iraq had managed to conceal equipment related to the 
production of weapons of mass destruction from U.N. weapons inspectors. 
Kay, Washington's chief weapons inspector and a special adviser to the 
CIA, leads the 1,200-strong Iraq Survey Group. In an interim report on its 
first three months of work presented to congressional intelligence 
committees last week, he said the group had found no chemical, nuclear 
or bioweapons, but had turned up evidence of a biological program. 
"We now have three cases in which scientists have come forward with 
equipment, technology, diagrams, documents and, in this case, actual 
weapons material, reference strains and botulinum toxin that they were 
told to hide and that the U.N. didn't find," he said Sunday. 

Asked about nuclear weapons, Kay said the team can't prove that Iraq 
was pursuing them immediately before the war began in March. 

"What we have said, and we said it in the report, we have numbers of 
Iraqis who tell us that Saddam was committed to acquiring weapons of 
mass destruction, including nuclear weapons," he said on CNN's "Late 
Edition with Wolf Blitzer." "And the issue is, how far along was that activity 
actually before the war?" 
 

Kay said there was evidence that Iraq was interested in starting a nuclear 
weapons program, but the work was at an early stage. 
He said on ABC's "This Week," "If someone had given them the enriched 
material or the plutonium, I think it would have taken them a year or less to 
fabricate a weapon from that material." 

Kay said there was "significant evidence" that Saddam was in violation of 
U.N. resolutions banning certain weapons. In last week's report, for 
example, he detailed evidence that Iraq's missile program -- which he said 
showed evidence of foreign assistance -- would have eventually led to 
missiles that could travel 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) "with a significant 
payload." 

U.N. sanctions against Iraq leveled after the Persian Gulf War of 1991 did 
not allow Baghdad missiles with a range of more than 150 kilometers (93 
miles). 

Asked about the probability of finding weapons of mass destruction, the 
former U.N. weapons inspector said on "Fox News Sunday," "I simply 
don't know. I have tried to conduct a work program that guarantees us that 
if they are there, we will find them. ... I don't want to estimate. I want to 
have proof." 

Because no weapons of mass destruction were found, the report 
prompted criticism against President Bush from opponents who accused 
him of going to war with Iraq too quickly. The claim that Iraq possessed 
banned weapons and was poised to use them was one of the U.S. 
government's main reasons for launching the war. 

Bush has indicated that he felt vindicated by the group's preliminary 
findings. 

The inspectors have found 130 large ammunition storage points 
containing more than 600,000 tons of arms -- one-third of the ammunitions 
stockpile of the U.S. military, Kay said. 

He said he is optimistic that the survey group will "get to the bottom of the 
program" because of the number of Iraqis cooperating. He has asked for 
millions in additional funding and six to nine months to finish the work.