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Kay report: Probe draws a blank on WMD

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON OCT. 3. In another blow to the Bush administration, the chief weapons hunter, David Kay, has said in his initial report to Congress that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq even if there is "possible evidence" of covert programmes. This has set off talk on Capitol Hill that the Republican administration went to war based on faulty intelligence estimates and raised questions whether the Iraq war was justified.

"We have not found at this point actual weapons. It does not mean we've concluded there are no actual weapons," the head of the Iraq Survey Group remarked after meeting law-makers. And in a statement to Congressional Committees, Mr. Kay had stressed that one strong finding was that the regime of Saddam Hussein was developing missiles that exceeded the limits set by the U.N.

Mr. Kay, an adviser to the CIA, said he needed another six to nine months to say definitively on the weapons. His search has so far cost the taxpayers some $300 millions and the Bush administration is asking for another $600 millions to continue the project — something that has raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Kay said that the team had found a "large body of continuing activities and equipment" that had not been declared to the U.N. inspecting team when they returned last November. But his assessment has raised concern among Republicans and Democrats.

The report comes at a time when the President, George W. Bush, is really taking a beating in opinion polls with the latest CBS News/New York Times survey finding the public's confidence in his ability to deal `wisely' with an international crisis declining to 45 per cent from 66 per cent this April.

More troubling to the White House should be that 50 per cent of those polled say that they are indeed uneasy with Mr. Bush's approach.

The Kay report is bound to fuel scepticism on the chief rationale dished out by this administration for going to war — that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction — biological and chemical — and was developing a nuclear weapon.

Mr. Kay has not endorsed even one of the claims put out by the President; nor has he even attempted to comment on another assertion of Mr. Bush — that Mr. Hussein had links with Al-Qaeda and other terror outfits.

"I'm not pleased by what I heard today," said the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, a Republican and added that "we should be willing to adopt a wait and see attitude — and that's the only alternative we really have".

But the White House said the administration was `pleased' because the report documented the fact that Mr. Hussein was in "violation" of the U.N. Security Council resolution 1441.

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