IRAQI WMD

SMH: Nearly all WMD claims wrong: Kay

The Central Intelligence Agency's outgoing chief weapons inspector, David Kay, has concluded that the US was almost certainly wrong in its pre-war belief that Iraq had any significant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Dr Kay, who headed the US search for WMDs after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime until he resigned on Friday, based his views on his team's interviews with Iraqi scientists, reviews of documents and examinations of facilities and other materials.

"I'm personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction," he said on Saturday. "We don't find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on. I think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990s."