- TBLISI, Georgia (AP) -- Secretary
of State Colin Powell held out the possibility Saturday that prewar Iraq
may not have possessed weapons of mass destruction.
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- Powell was asked about comments last week by David Kay,
the outgoing leader of a U.S. weapons search team in Iraq, that he did
not believe Iraq had large quantities of chemical or biological weapons.
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- "The answer to that question is, we don't know yet,"
Powell told reporters as he traveled to this former Soviet republic to
attend the inauguration Sunday of President-elect Mikhail Saakashvili.
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- Powell acknowledged that the United States thought deposed
leader Saddam Hussein had banned weapons but added, "We had questions
that needed to be answered.
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- "What was it?" he asked. "One hundred
tons, 500 tons or zero tons? Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times
that amount or nothing?"
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- A senior Bush administration official said Saturday from
Davos, Switzerland, where Vice President Dick Cheney was addressing political
and business leaders, that only time will tell about the accuracy of prewar
U.S. intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs.
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- "We won't know until we've gotten through the process
of interviewing all the people who were involved in those programs and
an opportunity to inspect all the sites - until we've completed the efforts
that Kay started and that somebody else now will have to finish,"
said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
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- Almost a year has passed since Powell's speech before
the U.N. Security Council in which he accused Iraq of violating a U.N.
weapons ban imposed after Iraq invade Kuwait more than a decade ago.
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- Since then, the administration has been less categorical
on the issue, contending that Saddam was actively pursuing banned weapons.
The administration generally has avoided the issue of actual possession
despite having spent at least $900 million in the weapons search.
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- President Bush, in his State of the Union address last
week, cited an interim report by Kay in October in which the inspector
claimed to have found dozens of weapons-related programs and equipment
in Iraq.
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- "Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of
mass destruction programs would continue to this day," the president
said.
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- On Friday, Bush's spokesman said the administration stood
by its assertions that Iraq had banned weapons at the time of the U.S.-led
war. Scott McClellan said it was only a matter of time before inspectors
uncover their location.
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- "We believe the truth will come out," he said.
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- Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, whose
signature campaign issue has been his opposition to the Iraq war, said
that Kay's comments further undermine Bush's claims that Iraq under Saddam
posed an imminent threat to the United States.
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- Last week, Vice President Cheney told National Public
Radio that the administration had not given up on the search for weapons.
The "jury is still out," he said.
-
- In his speech Saturday, Cheney urged "civilized
people" to do "everything in our power to defeat terrorism and
to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction."
-
- Taking over for Kay as head of the U.S.-led Iraq Survey
Group of roughly 1,400 scientists and other experts is Charles Duelfer,
the No. 2 weapons inspector for the United Nations in Iraq for much of
the 1990s. The team is going through documents, searching facilities and
interviewing Iraqis to determine the weapons capabilities of the fallen
Iraqi government.
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- While the emphasis was on weapons of mass destruction
as the reason to wage war on Iraq, the administration also suggested that
Saddam was linked with the al-Qaida organization. Like the weapons, no
firm evidence of a solid link has been produced.
-
- On Saturday, a U.S. official in Washington said Kurdish
forces had captured a senior al-Qaida figure as he tried to enter northern
Iraq.
-
- Hassan Ghul, a senior facilitator in Osama bin Laden's
terror network, was turned over to the United States and is being interrogated
at an undisclosed location, the official said.
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- The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, had
no details about whether Ghul was cooperating or providing useful information.
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- On Friday, a senior American official reported the capture
of a purported leader of anti-U.S. resistance in Iraq, Husam al-Yemeni,
who officials said headed a cell of operatives in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.
The official said al-Yemeni, linked to the Ansar al-Islam group in Kurdish
northern Iraq, was thought to be a close associate of Abu Musab Zarqawi,
described by some as a key link between the al-Qaida terrorist network
and Saddam.
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- In recent months, U.S. forces in central Iraq have detained
a handful of people suspected of having ties to al-Qaida, but American
intelligence officials described them as mostly low-level operatives with
unclear purposes in the country.
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- - Associated Press writer Katherine Pfleger contributed
to this report.
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- Copyright © 2004 The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority
of The Associated Press.
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