Full Article @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mi...ast/3426703.stm

Powell casts doubt on Iraq WMDs

US Secretary of State Colin Powell has conceded that Iraq may not have possessed any stocks of weapons of mass destruction before the war last year.
His comments came after the former head of the US weapons inspection team, David Kay, said he did not believe there were any weapons stockpiles.

Mr Powell was speaking on his way to the former Soviet republic of Georgia.

Less than a year ago, Mr Powell warned the United Nations Security Council about the danger from Iraq's weapons.


In the run-up to the US-led war against Iraq, he gave a presentation to the Security Council, in which he asserted that Saddam Hussein had amassed secret weapons of mass destruction.

He said then that he believed Iraq possessed, among other things, between 100 and 500 tonnes of chemical weapons agents.

But in his latest remarks, he told reporters travelling with him that it was an "open question" whether Iraq had any stocks of weapons of mass destruction at all.

"The answer to that question is, we don't know yet," Mr Powell said on his way to attend the inauguration on Sunday of the new Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili.

'No stockpiles'

On Friday, Mr Kay, who had led the US hunt for weapons in Iraq, resigned.

He told Reuters news agency he did not believe there had been large-scale production of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991.

"I don't think they existed," Mr Kay said.

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I am astounded personally that there hasn't been a greater uproar at the postwar events that have transpired in Iraq. I trusted George Bush and my government and believed that Iraq had all these programs, when I saw Colin Powell before the U.N. making claim after claim I believed most if not all of them and now this is simply disgusting to read the comments coming out of the government on Iraq. These circumstances that are unfolding represents a serious and aggregious violation of the faith of the American people in our beliefs about the government and the statements that they make towards other nations.

If a war was launched on false claims of weapons, previous but unfounded Iraqi programs and a lack of evidence of mobile labs, biological weapons, chemical weapons and a blueprint for nuclear weapons then I don't know what it will take to wake up the public to what truly transpired over the Iraq conflict or maybe we just want to forget about it as quickly as possible. Knowing what I know today I would have been one of the thousands protesting against this war because as I look back on it the Administration and Intelligence Agencies failed the American people by relaying an inaccurate and incomplete picture of the threat of Saddam to America. Can you say overblown, Bush made a 2 inch worm a 30 foot python and now the backstepping is slowly saturating from out of the White House.

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Last edited by NYCTrancefan on Jan-24-2004 at 23:00