Report: WMD Hunter Quitting

The lead suspect in the U.S. case for war against Iraq is in custody, but the chief weapons hunter is moving on, reports a newspaper.

Meanwhile, more questions are surfacing about the Bush administration's allegations leading up to war.

The Washington Post said Iraq Survey Group leader David Kay has cited personal reasons for his departure, which could come before February.

The work of the survey group, which has a staff of 1,400, will continue, but Kay's departure could suggest that the search for evidence has become futile. But some say Kay's work was hurt by the ongoing guerrilla war against U.S. troops in Iraq. Many of his experts were drafted to help track down insurgents.

"They took away a lot of his folks, some critical people, the linguists and analysts," Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Post. The newspaper says Kay's team is still interviewing Iraqi scientists, reviewing reams of documents and taking soil samples.

Officials said Kay expected to find weapons evidence quickly when he took the job in June. But to date, no evidence of actual biological or chemical weapons stockpiles has been found. Instead, Kay's October progress report said that so far, there is evidence of weapons programs.

Since his arrest this weekend, Saddam Hussein has denied to his interrogators that his regime had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda, U.S. officials said.

In his interview with ABC this week, President Bush was asked about the apparent gap between White House allegations of actual weapons and the evidence so far pointing only to possible programs.

"What's the difference?" he responded. The New York Times reports war critics see a major difference between programs and stockpiles. "This was a pre-emptive war, and the rationale was that there was an imminent threat," said Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., told The Times.

Kay told Congress that his team had "discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002," including "a clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses … that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing (chemical and biological weapons) research."

Kay cited "significant information" that Iraq's intelligence services were involved in biological weapons (BW) programs, but that after 1996, Iraq's biological weapons program was shifted to "maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents."

The survey group gathered evidence that "Iraq explored the possibility of chemical weapons (CW) production in recent years" but had also heard from sources that "Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally controlled CW program after 1991."

"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," Kay reported. "However, Iraq did take steps to preserve some technological capability from the pre-1991 nuclear weapons program."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair highlighted Kay's evidence in a recent interview with the British Forces Broadcasting Service, according to the BBC.

"The Iraq Survey Group has already found massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories, workings by scientists, plans to develop long range ballistic missiles," he said. "Now, frankly, these things weren't being developed unless they were developed for a purpose."

But former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Kay reported no evidence that the labs in question were actually used for weapons of mass destruction.

"That's innuendo that laboratories were for WMD," Blix said. "My guess is that there are no weapons of mass destruction left."

The strongest evidence to date seems to have emerged regarding Iraq's alleged missile programs. Documents and evidence from U.S. interrogations suggest Iraq received technical assistance from two teams of Yugoslav missile experts and another foreign country that sources would not name.

The help, provided from 2001 to as late as this year, was allegedly aimed at extending the range of Iraq's missile, which was restricted under Security Council resolutions. The documents also point to negotiations with North Korea to buy long-range missiles, the official says. Iraq made a $10 million down payment in 2002 but Pyongyang said it could not deliver the weapons, according to the Journal.

Much of the dispute over the prewar allegations concerns whether the Bush administration was given bad data or misused the information they had.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., told a Florida newspaper this weekend that in a classified briefing to around 75 senators before their October 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war, officials said Iraq has unmanned aerial vehicles that could dump biological or chemical agents on the East Coast of the United States.

"They have not found anything that resembles an UAV that has that capability," Nelson said, according to the Florida Today newspaper.