U.S. Keeps WMD Team Spinning Wheels

U.N. Team Still Looking for Iraq's Arsenal

Though Work Is Seen as Irrelevant, Security Council Can't Agree to End It

By Colum Lynch, Washington Post

UNITED NATIONS -- More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan's East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. But the inspectors' primary mission -- ridding Hussein's regime of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons -- has become irrelevant since a U.S.-led coalition toppled the Iraqi leader and discovered that his government had destroyed its most lethal weapons shortly after the 1991 Gulf War.

Rewind to 2004: Ooops! No WMD

Kay: No evidence Iraq stockpiled WMDs

January 26, 2004

(CNN) -- Two days after resigning as the Bush administration's top weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay said that his group found no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March.

"My summary view, based on what I've seen, is we're very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons. I don't think they exist."