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Powells statement was aparently made long before Sept.11,2001 alot of peoples attitudes changed in that time period.

This thread was not based on anything that matters in world of today. Words are after all just words. Some have great importance and others do not.

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And if Hussein was not a threat to his neighbors, then he certainly wasn’t a threat to the United States of America.

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David Kay will tell the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress that Saddam pretended his battlefield commanders had chemical weapons, in order to deter invasion, according to the Washington Post.

At closed briefings on Thursday, he is also widely expected to say that so far no weapons have been found.

The BBC's Justin Webb says that, although the results are only provisional, it is fair to predict that they will not be the findings the Bush administration wanted or expected to see.

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Originally posted by Ritten:
Yes, that is very puzzling, I do admit, unless his capacity was destroyed some how....

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You'll find out sometime this month, I expect.
Kay is planning to make his case to Congress as early as mid-September.

Rob, First of Two

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WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 � The government's chief weapons inspector in Iraq told Congress Thursday that his team had failed to find illegal weapons after three months of scouring the country, but he said they had discovered some evidence of Saddam Hussein's intent to develop such weapons and even signs that Baghdad had retained some capacity to do so.

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Congressional leaders from both parties expressed concern that Dr. Kay's group had not found proof that Iraq, on the eve of war, had unconventional weapons.

"I'm not pleased by what I heard today," said Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He said Americans were hoping there would be a breakthrough by now, but, he said, "There has not been a breakthrough."

He said his committee is continuing to investigate why the C.I.A. and other agencies were off the mark in assessing Iraq's weapons programs.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the ranking minority member on the Senate intelligence committee, said that Dr. Kay's report raised fresh doubts about the Bush administration's policy of pre-emptive war.

"I just think it's extraordinary that a decision was made to go to war, and that we were told by our highest policy makers that there was, you know, an imminent threat," he said.

He said he wondered whether further inspections would turn up anything, saying "this raises real questions about something called the doctrine of pre-emption, the way we make decisions at the highest level," he said.

James Risen and Judith Miller, The New York Times

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NEWS ANALYSIS: ASSESSMENT

A Reckoning: Iraqi Arms Report Poses Political Test for Bush

The preliminary report delivered on Thursday by the chief arms inspector in Iraq forces the Bush administration to come face to face with this reality: that Saddam Hussein's armory appears to have been stuffed with precursors, potential weapons and bluffs, but that nothing found so far backs up administration claims that Mr. Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world.

In public, President Bush says that is not the issue. What should make a difference to Americans, and to the world, he says, is that Mr. Hussein is gone and Iraq is free. "One thing is for certain," Mr. Bush argued last month at a fund-raiser, using a line he repeats often these days. "Terrorist groups will not ever be able to get weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because Saddam Hussein is no more."

But in private, Mr. Bush's political aides concede that it does matter, and it may matter more as the politics of running for president collide with the realities of containing the chaos in occupied Iraq.

While the report by the arms inspector, David Kay, is not final, and while the inspectors may yet come upon a cache of weapons, the preliminary findings support the claims of critics, including Democratic candidates, that Mr. Bush used dubious intelligence to justify his decision to go to war. At worst, these critics say, the usual caveats and cautions of the underlying intelligence reports were ignored in the rush to war.

Without question, the gap between what Mr. Bush said existed in Iraq and what Dr. Kay has failed to find will be argued about again and again as Americans discuss whether it was right to go into Iraq in the first place, and debate what to do now.

David E. Sanger, The New York Times

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In Iraq, U.S. Finds No Banned Weapons
Tenet Assails Panel Leaders' Criticism of Prewar Data

After searching for nearly six months, U.S. forces and CIA experts have found no chemical or biological weapons in Iraq and have determined that Iraq's nuclear program was in only "the very most rudimentary" state, the Bush administration's chief investigator formally told Congress yesterday.

Before the war, the administration said Iraq had a well-developed nuclear program that presented a threat to the United States.

Now, "It clearly does not look like a massive, resurgent program, based on what we discovered," former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, who heads the government's search, said yesterday after briefing House and Senate intelligence committees in a closed session on his interim report. He said he will need six to nine months to conclude his work, and congressional sources said the administration is requesting an additional $600 million toward the effort to find weapons of mass destruction.

Dana Priest and Walter Pincus, The Washington Post

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