Colin Powell doubts earlier WMD claim

US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who urged the United Nations to endorse a pre-emptive war to strip Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, conceded on Saturday that Saddam Hussein’s government may have no longer had such munitions. One day after David Kay, the chief US weapons inspector in Iraq, said he believes Saddam had not stockpiled unconventional weapons for years, Powell told reporters that his prominent February 5 argument was based on ‘‘what our intelligence community believed was credible.’’

‘‘What is the open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn’t have any, then why wasn’t that known before hand?’’ Powell said aboard his plane en route to Sunday’s presidential inauguration of Mikheil Saakashvili.