No evidence of WMDs in Iraq: chief U.S weapons inspector

The outgoing chief U.S. weapons inspector, David Kay, said he doubts Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and questioned the information-gathering capabilities of American intelligence services.

"I don't think they exist," Kay said of Iraq's weapons after nine months of searching.

Kay had predicted he would find illicit weapons when he began the search shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime.

"We have to remember that this view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change in the Bush administration," said Kay.

And on Monday, the group Human Rights Watch dismissed another Bush rationale for the invasion of Iraq, saying it cannot be considered a justifiable humanitarian intervention.

Executive director Kenneth Roth said Saddam's regime was a brutal one, but not in the years and months immediately leading up to the U.S.-led invasion.

"Such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter," Roth said. "They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."

Saddam's 1988 extermination of Kurds in northern Iraq would have justified an international intervention at the time, he added.

As weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize in the months after the invasion, U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair increasingly began to justify their actions on humanitarian grounds.

The statement by Human Rights Watch undermines the leaders' efforts to do so legitimately.

David Kay, who stepped down as chief weapons inspector last week, told National Public Radio in the U.S. that "it's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."

The Bush administration said Saddam's program of WMDs, based on information gathered by the intelligence community, was part of the justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

When asked whether Bush owes the U.S. an explanation following Kay's findings, Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people."

Kay said that based on the intelligence that existed, he thought "it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat."

In an interview with the New York Times, Kay said he did not believe the White House put pressure on analysts to come up with intelligence pointing to a weapons program.

He said one problem was that the CIA should have had its own spies in Iraq.

Kay also said that Saddam had authorized a WMD program but that Iraqi scientists were able to fake programs and use that money for other purposes.

He said Iraq did try to restart its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001, but it would have taken years to rebuild after being largely abandoned in the 1990s.

The White House has said that it remains confident that WMD will be found.