Apparently some people are having trouble accessing the link I posted:

http://www.boston.com/news/world/art...s_hunter_quits
_says_he_doubts_they_exist/

It is from Boston.com, the Boston Globe online. Here is the text:


US weapons hunter quits, says he doubts they exist
By Tabassum Zakaria, Reuters, 1/24/2004

WASHINGTON -- David Kay, who stepped down as leader of the US hunt for
banned weapons in Iraq yesterday, said he did not believe the country had
any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.

In a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which says its invasion of
Iraq was justified by the presence of illicit arms, Kay said in a telephone
interview he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found.

"I don't think they existed," Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is
stockpiles produced after the end of the last [1991] Gulf War, and I don't
think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said.

The CIA announced earlier that former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer,
who has expressed his own doubts that unconventional weapons would be found,
would succeed Kay as Washington's chief arms hunter.

Kay said he believes most of what was going to be uncovered in Iraq had been
found and that the weapons hunt would become more difficult once America
returned control of the country to the Iraqis.

The United States went to war against Baghdad last year citing a threat from
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. So far, no banned arms have been found.

In his annual State of the Union address Tuesday, President Bush insisted
that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had actively pursued dangerous
weapons programs right up to the start of the US attack in March.

"Had we failed to act," Bush said, "the dictator's weapons of mass
destruction programs would continue to this day."

On Wednesday, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States had not
given up on finding unconventional weapons in Iraq. "The jury is still out,"
he said in an interview with National Public Radio.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, responding to Kay's remarks, said:
"We remain confident that the Iraq Survey Group will uncover the truth about
Saddam Hussein's regime, the regime's weapons of destruction programs."

Kay said he left his post because of a "complex set of issues," including a
reduction in resources and a change in focus of the Defense Department's
Iraq Survey Group, which is conducting the weapons hunt.

ISG analysts were diverted from hunting for weapons of mass destruction to
helping in the fight against the insurgency, he said. "When I had started
out I had made it a condition that ISG be exclusively focused on WMD. That's
no longer so."

"We're not going to find much after June. Once the Iraqis take complete
control of the government, it is just almost impossible to operate in the
way that we operate," Kay said.

"I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we're going to find," he
said. "I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale
production, and that's what we're really talking about."

Kay said he was going back to the private sector.

In a statement announcing Kay's departure, CIA Director George Tenet praised
Kay for his "extraordinary service under dangerous and difficult
circumstances."

Duelfer, 51, a former deputy executive chairman of the UN Special Commission
that was responsible for dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, had
previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found.

"I think that Mr. Kay and his team have looked very hard. I think the reason
that they haven't found them is they're probably not there," Duelfer told
NBC television earlier this month.

But after his new job was announced, Duelfer, who will be based in Iraq as
CIA special adviser to direct the WMD search, said he was keeping an open
mind and his past comments had been made without the benefit of seeing the
most current US intelligence reports.

"This was a spectator sport for me," he told reporters in a conference call
yesterday.

"We'll see, I mean we don't know what the answers are. Maybe there still
will be weapons. It's a big country. There's a lot of chaos there. It may
well be that something turns up. I don't want to prejudge that, that still
may happen," he said.