Admiral says banned arms claims were exaggerated
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Your support makes all the difference.Military chiefs have tried to limit expectations of the weapons of mass destruction secreted in Iraq.
Insisting they were there and would be found, Admiral Sir Alan West, the First Sea Lord and former Chief of Defence Intelligence, hinted that the numbers and scale of Saddam Hussein's biological, chemical and nuclear programmes may have been exaggerated.
"There are some people who have talked in terms of thousands of tonnes of chemicals and hundreds and hundreds of missiles, and I would say that is way beyond the top end," Sir Alan said, though he added: "I am absolutely convinced they have got elements of weapons of mass destruction."
The Government and the military, which so far has failed to turn up evidence of the weapons programme used as a trigger for war on Iraq, insists the truth about Saddam Hussein's WMD programme will not be revealed until scientists coerced into working for the Iraqi dictator or officials defecting from the crumbling regime could be interviewed.
UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to investigate only "a small spot" in "huge areas" of a very big country with "lots of dark corners". Sites "crop up all the time", the admiral said, as the coalition forces continued their progress in Iraq.
He reminded a Ministry of Defence press conference last week that the only real details of Iraq's plans to develop WMDs before the 1991 Gulf War had come from a defector. "The best way is to talk to those people who can give us the detail and explain what is happening," he said. "I think we will expose this for what it is and I am certain that they do exist."
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