Washington, June 07: The Pentagon's Intelligence agency had no hard evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons last fall but believed Iraq had a program in place to produce them, the agency's chief said. The assessment suggests a higher degree of uncertainty about the immediacy of an Iraqi threat, which was the main justification for war. Two months after the major fighting in Iraq ended, the United States has yet to find any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, although it did find two trailers it judged to be mobile laboratories for producing bio-weapons. Vice Adm Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, discussed the matter at a Capitol Hill News Conference yesterday as the administration scrambled to respond to news reports about excerpts from a September 2002 DIA report on facilities and other pieces of Iraq's arms-building infrastructure.

Jacoby said his agency concurred in an intelligence community consensus last fall that Iraq had a program for Weapons of Mass Destruction. But the DIA was unable to pinpoint any locations.

"We could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the Weapons of Mass Destruction program, specifically the chemical warfare portion," Jacoby said at a joint news conference with Sen John Warner and Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon's Intelligence Chief.


At the White House, visiting Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Durao Barroso told reporters that US President George W Bush told him yesterday he has "full confidence in the intelligence reports he received about the possession of WMDs by the former Iraqi authorities." Bureau Report