1200 Inspectors, 90 days, $300M spent, WMD found = 0

Top Arms Hunter David Kay Gives His Report:

1200 Inspectors, 90 Days, $300 Million WMD Found: 0


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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=449413


1,200 weapons inspectors spent 90 days in Iraq. The exercise cost $300m. And the number of weapons found? 0

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington and Paul Waugh
03 October 2003



Five months after the end of the war in Iraq, a CIA adviser has admitted that his 1,200-strong team of inspectors has discovered none of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons," David Kay, the head of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, said in a first report to closed-door sessions of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, 90 days after the arrival of his group in Iraq. Mr Kay insisted that lines of inquiry on which the group were working might yet yield concrete proof. He hoped to "draw a line" under his work in six to nine months. In the report he argued that the bulkiest material that inspectors were searching for could be hidden in spaces little larger than a two-car garage. "We are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone".

He said: "Much evidence is irretrievably lost." He also blamed the slow progress on the way Iraq had arranged its WMD activities, the widespread destruction of materials and documents before the war, and looting of suspect sites afterwards.

But the meagre results seem bound to reinforce contentions that the US and British governments, wilfully or by error, grossly exaggerated the scale and the imminence of any threat from Saddam.

Mr Kay could do no better than draw three broad conclusions from his endeavours.

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They just asked for six hundred million more for six more months. A half a trillion dollars going where? How many people does David Kay have working for him? Seems to me they are being paid quite handsomely. If there are twelve hundred people, which I doubt then they are getting a hundred thjousand dollars a month each. I think something is wrong with this picture but then again I don't watch Fox News so don't know how I'm supposed to think.