WASHINGTON, 3 October 2003 — The last time CIA adviser David Kay visited Congress, he hinted that a breakthrough was imminent in the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As Kay returned yesterday, there was no report of a breakthrough.
Kay, the CIA’s special adviser for the weapons search, began two days of closed-door meetings in Congress, and lawmakers don’t expect him to announce any major discoveries.
Some are becoming increasingly skeptical that search teams will ever uncover weapons that were a primary reason cited by the United States to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. “There don’t seem to be signs of it at this point,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “There is nothing that would lead me to believe that it (a discovery) is imminent.”
Kay did not speak to reporters after meeting with members of the House Intelligence and Appropriations committees.
Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said the Bush administration has lowered expectations that Kay would have anything dramatic to report.
Once confident that weapons would be uncovered, Roberts said he was not so sure any more.
“I think it’s such a tough job,” he said. He said a large number of people are needed to translate and analyze Iraqi documents and that Saddam’s “denial and deception program was much more robust than we had anticipated.”
Asked if he believed the weapons ever existed, Roberts said, “At one point I’m sure they did. Where they are now and what point they are now, I just don’t know.”
Kay’s visit came as the United States spelled out a draft resolution in the UN Security Council that diplomats said did not match their vision of how to run postwar Iraq. France said the draft snubbed its concerns while UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, in unusually strong language, said the text was moving in the wrong direction as the divided Council again struggled to find common ground.
The United States wants the resolution to give UN backing for a multinational force to help keep the peace. Opponents are calling for an expanded UN role in Iraq and a faster handover of power to Iraqis.
“The revised text does not address our wishes,” France’s UN ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere said after the Council’s first meeting on the new draft. It “leaves the United Nations in a secondary role,” he said.
