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Thursday, September 25, 2003.
PM won't comment on weapons speculation
The Prime Minister has again defended his decision to join the war in Iraq after claims overnight the arms inspectors there are ready to report they have found no trace of weapons of mass destruction.
The BBC says a source in the Bush administration has confirmed that is the finding of the survey group's interim report, due to be released next month. But John Howard has told Southern Cross radio he will wait to see the report before commenting. "What's coming out of London this morning can only at this stage be regarded as speculation," he said. "I would imagine that the Iraq survey group would do more work and when I get details of that I will have something to say about it but I can only repeat and I repeat this very strongly that the intelligence we had at the time about their capability was very credible and very strong and I don't retreat one iota from the decision that we took." The US Central Intelligence Agency says the interim report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction by former weapons inspector David Kay is not expected to reach any firm conclusions or rule anything in or out. The CIA says Mr Kay, who is leading the US effort to account for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, is still receiving information from the field and his report will only be the "first progress report". "We expect it will reach no firm conclusions, nor will it rule anything in or out," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said in a statement. The BBC, citing a US government official, has reported the Iraq Survey Group that Mr Kay leads will report that it has found not even a "minute" amount of chemical, biological or nuclear materials, nor any delivery systems nor laboratories for developing such weapons. The BBC says the same source has also told it the report also will say it is highly unlikely that weapons of mass destruction were squirreled out of Iraq to countries like Syria before the war began. However, the document will include computer programs and files and paperwork and pictures suggesting that Saddam Hussein's regime was developing a weapons of mass destruction program, the BBC said. High expectations have surrounded Mr Kay's interim report, which is expected soon, because the administration has been unable to explain what happened to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the primary US rationale for invading the country and toppling Saddam's regime. But top administration officials, accused by opposition politicians of hyping intelligence findings to justify the war, have voiced confidence that a massive intelligence gathering effort led by Mr Kay would find evidence that Iraq had active programs on the eve of the war. As recently as Monday, US President George Bush said he believed that Saddam buried or dispersed his weapons before the US-led invasion. But he said it would take Mr Kay "a while" to uncover the truth about what happened to them. The former heads of the UN disarmament effort, Hans Blix and Rolf Ekeus, have concluded that Iraq probably destroyed its arsenal of chemical and biological weapons after the 1990-1991 Gulf War but pretended to have them to deter attack. US commanders were surprised when their forces found no stockpiles of Iraqi chemical or biological weapons, either as they overran Iraqi positions around Baghdad or in subsquent searches of suspect sites around the country. The Iraq Survey Group, which includes some 1,400 US and British personnel, was then assembled to try to piece together what happened to the weapons from captured documents, interrogations and tips from Iraqis. At the end of July, Mr Kay said the search was making "solid progress". But the Bush administration has sought to play down the issue in recent weeks, emphasising instead the large scale abuse of human rights by the Iraqi regime as a justification for ousting Saddam. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on his return from Iraq earlier this month that he had not even asked Mr Kay whether his search had uncovered weapons of mass destruction.  © 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation |
