Washington ? U.S. intelligence agencies need to explain why their research indicated Iraq possessed banned weapons before the American-led invasion, says the outgoing top U.S. inspector, who now believes Saddam Hussein had no such arms.

“I don’t think they exist,” David Kay said Sunday. “The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist — we’ve got to deal with that difference and understand why.”

Kay’s remarks on National Public Radio reignited criticism from Democrats, who ignored his cautions that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction was “not a political issue.”

“It’s an issue of the capabilities of one’s intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information,” Kay said. Asked whether President Bush owed the nation an explanation for the gap between his warnings and Kay’s findings, Kay said: “I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people.”

The CIA would not comment Sunday on Kay’s remarks, although one intelligence official pointed out that Kay himself had predicted last year that his search would turn up banned weapons.

Kay said his predictions were not “coming back to haunt me in the sense that I am embarrassed. They are coming back to haunt me in the sense of ‘Why could we all be so wrong?”‘

Kay told The New York Times in a later interview posted for today’s editions that U.S. intelligence agencies did not realize Iraqi scientists presented Saddam with plans for weapons programs and then used the money he authorized for other purposes.

“The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process,” he told the Times. “The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programs.”

He said he has had U.S. intelligence analysts come to him, “almost in tears, saying they felt so badly that we weren’t finding what they had thought we were going to find — I have had analysts apologizing for reaching the conclusions they did.”

Kay said Iraq did try to restart its nuclear weapons program in 2000.

He said it was now clear that the CIA’s basic problem was that the agency lacked its own spies in Iraq who could provide credible information, but that he did not believe analysts were pressed by the Bush administration to make their reports conform to a White House agenda.

The White House stuck by its assertions that illicit weapons would be found in Iraq.