Weapons team seeks more time

WASHINGTON -- CIA special adviser David Kay said yesterday that while his search has found no banned weapons in Iraq, it has uncovered evidence of "intent" to restart the building of such an arsenal.

Kay's statement capped a day of closed-door appearances before House and Senate committees considering requests for more money for hunting weapons. Kay sought to convince lawmakers that the team needs at least six more months -- and perhaps $600 million -- to get to the bottom of what happened to Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

In the months leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush and his top aides justified the attack on the grounds that Saddam possessed actual weapons.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed U.S. intelligence officials knew actual locations of the unconventional weapons. At the United Nations in February, Secretary of State Colin Powell said U.S. claims about banned Iraqi weapons were based on "solid intelligence."

Kay's coming up empty six months after the U.S. forces seized Baghdad is proving to be a major embarrassment for the White House.

But in his testimony before the congressional intelligence committees, released late yesterday by the CIA, Kay insisted that the team, known as the Iraqi Survey Group, is not wasting its time.

Iraq's use of chemical weapons in its war with Iran in the 1980s has been well-documented. In the 1980s and the 1990s, Iraq admitted that it was developing biological and nuclear weapons.

Despite a lack of actual weapons, Kay's teams have uncovered "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."

Key findings from Kay's report:

No chemical weapons have been found. Kay provided the least amount of evidence in the chemical field although both the U.S. and British governments had argued the strongest case in this area.

No long-range missiles have been discovered. Kay said his teams found evidence Iraq had design plans for a missile with a range of up to 620 miles. According to U.N. inspectors, however, they have known for years about these plans and others, including plans for a missile with a range of up to 1,860 miles.

No biological weapons have been found. Kay said "reference strains" of biological organisms had been found in the home of a scientist. Such material cannot, however, be used to produce biological warfare agents.

Kay also undercut one key administration prewar claim -- that Iraq was building nuclear weapons.

Vice President Dick Cheney, in a television appearance three days before the start of the U.S. invasion, said that Iraq "has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Kay said in his statement to Congress that despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, "to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material."

After the hearing, some lawmakers indicated they were impatient with the progress in finding unconventional weapons in Iraq, a main pretext for going to war.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the intelligence panel, said that Congress voted to authorize war last year on the basis of administration claims about banned weapons.

"To be where we are today, without any evidence ... and then asking for another six-to-nine months and a good deal of money, leads me to believe that we need to do some serious thinking about the doctrine of pre-emption," Rockefeller said.

The New York Times yesterday reported that Kay was seeking an additional $600 million to continue the Iraqi Survey Group's so-far fruitless search -- on top of $300 million already spent by weapons hunters.

Meanwhile, France, Russia and Germany signaled yesterday at the United Nations that a new U.S. draft resolution on Iraq did not meet their demands, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan said it did not follow his recommendation for a quick transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government.

The revised resolution endorses a step-by-step transfer of authority to an Iraqi interim administration but sets no timetable for the handover of sovereignty and leaves the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in overall control until elections are held at some future unspecified date.