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Search in Iraq Finds No Banned Weapons
Tenet Assails Panel Leaders' Criticism of Prewar Data

By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, October 3, 2003; Page A01

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....

...On Oct. 7, 2002, Bush said that "the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. . . . Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."...