On the eve of war, US President George W. Bush told the world that intelligence left no doubt Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It was among the final assertions of an 18-month campaign by his administration to cast Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as a serious and imminent threat.
Six months later, there are doubts.
Last week, the CIA's chief weapons hunter, David Kay, told Congress: "We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist, or that they existed before the war and our only task is to find where they have gone."
On March 17, two days before the war, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
Kay presented an interim report Thursday that disclosed findings of his search teams. He argued against drawing final conclusions, saying he will be able to provide a full picture on Iraq's weapons programs in six to nine months.
So far Bush's prewar assertion is one of many that have not been validated by discoveries in Iraq.
A look at some:
Nuclear weapons
Vice President Dick Cheney, in a speech on Aug. 26 last year: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."
Formal intelligence assessments were more conservative: "Although we assess that Saddam does not yet have nuclear weapons or sufficient material to make any, he remains intent on acquiring them. Most agencies assess that Baghdad started reconstituting its nuclear program about the time that [United Nations] inspectors depart -- December 1998," says the National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, in October last year.
Kay: "Despite evidence of Saddam's continued ambition to acquire nuclear weapons, to date we have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile material."
Biological weapons
"The issue is that he's developing and has biological weapons," Cheney told CNN on March 24 last year.
The NIE, six months later: "We judge Iraq has some lethal and incapacitating BW agents and is capable of quickly producing and weaponizing a variety of such agents, including anthrax, for delivery by bombs, missiles, aerial sprayers and covert operatives. ... Baghdad has established a large-scale, redundant and concealed BW agent production capability."
Kay said his teams have uncovered evidence of what they interpret as a covert biological weapons development program, possibly centered in secret labs run by the Iraqi intelligence service. But he reported no signs any weapons were produced.
"Teams are uncovering significant information -- including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service in possible BW activities and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents."
Chemical weapons
Before the war, the belief was widely held that Iraq had chemical weapons. Saddam had used them in the 1980s against Iranian troops in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war and against restive Iraqi Kurds.
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