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Blix questions veracity of US evidence on Iraq

"It is sort of puzzling, I think, that you can have 100 percent certainty about the weapons of mass destruction's existence, and zero certainty about where they are."

Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector

Chief UN inspector Hans Blix criticized the US for insisting so vehemently that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and not producing the evidence.

"It is sort of puzzling, I think, that you can have 100 percent certainty about the weapons of mass destruction's existence, and zero certainty about where they are," he said Monday. "We were more prudent in our assessment and I think that was shown to be pretty wise."

A week before he ends his three-year hunt for Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, Blix spent an hour fielding questions at the Council on Foreign Relations and defending his conclusion that while many questions remain about Iraq's weapons programs there is still no evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding them.

Blix questioned the Bush administration's rush to declare that two mobile vans discovered by US search teams after the war were used to make biological weapons.

"Only later came the various doubts from both the US experts and from the British experts," he said. "I would have thought that ... after the shakiness of some of the evidence that one would be very prudent."

He said the US was not alone in believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. "I think all the Western intelligence agencies that I met were fairly convinced that there were weapons of mass destruction," he said, though Russia never "came out affirmatively."

The failure of US-led teams to find illegal weapons after more than two months of searching and visits to over 230 suspected sites has become a major issue in Washington, London and other capitals. Saddam's possession of banned weapons was the main justification the US and Britain used for invading Iraq.

Blix, who is retiring when his contract ends on June 30, said US teams may yet find banned weapons, but the more time goes by, the more the question arises of whether Saddam's regime destroyed its weapons programs in 1991 -- as it claimed.

The question would then arise of why Iraq played cat-and-mouse with UN inspectors for so long.

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