US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted Wednesday that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein harbored his ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction.

Speaking to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Rice also accused the former Iraqi leader of deceiving the international community.

"Right up until the end, Saddam lied to the Security Council. And let there be no mistake, right up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons activity," Rice said.

"Had any one of these examples been discovered last winter, the Security Council would have had to meet, and I believe that they would have had no choice but to take exactly the course that President Bush followed," Rice said.

The team led by chief US weapons hunter David Kay "is finding proof that Iraq never disarmed and never complied with UN inspectors," she said. Kay's report provided "hard evidence of facts that no one should ever have doubted."

Kay, a CIA adviser in charge of US efforts to hunt weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said in a statement Thursday that no such weapons have been found yet and his team will continue the search.
 
(Xinhua News Agency October 9, 2003)