Poison stockpiles probably don't exist, says chief US inspector

LARGE stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons probably do not exist in Iraq and prewar intelligence reports were “assumptions” based on “fragmentary information”, the Bush Administration’s own chief weapons inspector in Baghdad has conceded.

David Kay, appointed by the CIA to lead the American search for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, told leaders of the House Intelligence Committee that only “bits of evidence” about WMD programmes were slowly emerging.

The State of the Union speech was not a “one-man show”, Chuck Hagel, a Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said.

“There’s a cloud hanging over this Administration,” he said, adding that Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, Condoleezza Rice, Mr Bush’s National Security Adviser, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, and Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, were all involved in decisions on intelligence. He said that Americans needed to know: did the US base its reasoning for war on “faulty intelligence or abused intelligence?”

Arlen Specter, another Republican senator, also questioned White House attempts to blame Mr Tenet. “As President Harry S. Truman said: ‘The buck stops with the President of the United States,’ ” he said. A CBS News poll indicated that 56 per cent of Americans now believe that the Administration had lied or concealed elements of what it knew about Iraq’s weapons.