Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The former top U.S. weapon hunter in Iraq found himself caught between U.S. senators from both parties yesterday as they argued over the meaning of his view that no weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq (see GSN, Jan. 26). Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, former Iraq Survey Group chief David Kay resisted both Republican suggestions that WMD stockpiles may still be found in Iraq and Democratic attempts to portray President George W. Bush’s administration as having engineered an unjustified new urgency about the threat posed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In a wide-ranging hearing, Kay also expressed continuing support for the Iraq war, faulted U.S. intelligence agencies for relying too heavily on technology, appeared to support an outside investigation into Bush administration use of intelligence and contradicted Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent claim that inspectors have found mobile biological weapon laboratories in Iraq.

Kay resigned last week from his post and has said repeatedly since then that Iraq appears to have had no WMD stockpiles or assembled weapons before last year’s war. 

“We were almost all wrong,” he said yesterday, “and I certainly include myself here. … My view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction. I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war … believed that there were WMD. It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.”

Kay said he began to realize as early as last July that no “assembled weapons” were likely to be found in Iraq and that his communication of the view to U.S. officials met with “healthy skepticism.”

Kay said Hussein sought to maintain weapon delivery programs and the capability to quickly regain actual weapons if given the opportunity. In particular, he said Iraq “was in the early stages of renovating the [nuclear] program, building new buildings. It was not a reconstituted, full-blown nuclear program.” Asked about whether Hussein could have used chemical weapons against invading troops, he added, “We have not found chemical weapons on the battlefield, even in small quantities.”

The former U.N. inspector in Iraq said that in the 1990s, “We were better than we thought we were. … Inspections accomplish a great deal in holding a program down.” Kay stressed, though, that the “final truth” about Iraq’s weapons could not have been established by U.N. inspections.

Former U.N. Monitoring and Verification Commission Executive Chairman Hans Blix today differed somewhat with Kay’s view that intelligence analysts, not the Bush administration, were at fault.

“We were skeptical about the evidence” presented by the United States before the war, Blix said in Stockholm. “We were among those who expressed doubts, but we did not deny the possibility that there could be weapons,” he said.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace proliferation expert Joseph Cirincione, a frequent critic of the Bush administration’s conduct with respect to Iraq, questioned the impartiality of Kay, long considered a hard-liner on Hussein’s Iraq. Kay cannot credibly dismiss, as he did yesterday in testimony, charges that the administration misused intelligence on Iraq, Cirincione said.

“Dr. Kay is in a particularly bad position to be judging the credibility of the intelligence before the war, since he was a direct participant in the creation of the myth that Saddam’s programs presented a growing danger,” Cirincione said today.

Administration Did Not Pressure Analysts, Misuse Intelligence, Kay Says

Kay expressed continuing support for the war in Iraq despite his group’s failure to find WMD stockpiles. He said weapon hunters have found “hundreds of cases” in which Iraq violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 ― Iraq’s “one last chance to come clean about what it had,” he said ― and that often, Iraqi officials were explicitly instructed not to reveal information.

“I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein,” he said, adding that corruption in Baghdad after 1998 made an eventual Iraqi WMD transfer to terrorists more likely.

Proliferation to a third party, Kay said, was a bigger risk than the resumption of Iraqi WMD programs. “The way the society was going, and the number of willing buyers in the market … that probably was a risk that, if we did avoid, we barely avoided,” he said.

Kay rejected the idea that the administration pressured intelligence analysts to reach conclusions that suited its aims, instead faulting what he called a longstanding overemphasis on technology at the expense of human intelligence. He dismissed the notion, advanced by top committee Democrat Carl Levin (Mich.) and other Democrats, that U.S. assessment of intelligence on Iraq changed suddenly after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks.

Asked about charges that administration members systematically dropped caveats from analysts’ assessments when discussing the Iraqi threat with the public and others outside the administration, Kay said it is “natural” for such caveats to fall away as assessments move up through the government.

“Writing caveats has about the same intellectual enjoyment as being a writer for the National Geographic. … Caveats tend to fall into footnotes; they tend to fall into smaller-point type. … You’ve just got limited time and attention, and it’s a natural filtering phenomenon, as opposed to a physical cutting,” said Kay.

Blix today adopted a diplomatic line on the matter but questioned prewar U.S. characterizations of the gravity of the Iraqi threat. “I never expressed any doubts about the good faith of governments … but they were wrong. … They were putting exclamation marks instead of question marks behind many statements,” Blix said.

Although Kay rejected the idea that intelligence assessments changed after Sept. 11, he said the administration’s stance toward Iraqi WMD was based in part on a generally heightened sensitivity after the 2001 attacks.

“After 9/11, the shadowing effects of that horrible tragedy changed, as a nation, the level of risk that all of us are prepared to run, that we would like to avoid. … Where you place yourself on that spectrum of how much risk you’re going to run is a political responsibility which elected officials have and I certainly don’t have,” Kay said.

Consistency of Intelligence Over Recent Years Debated

Kay said intelligence analysts have believed for “the last 12-15 years” that Iraq was a “gathering serious threat” and were surprised to find no WMD stocks in the country.

Last year in Iraq, Kay said, “I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance. And never ― not in a single case ― was the explanation, ‘I was pressured to do this.’ The explanation was very often, ‘The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there’s another explanation for it.’”

“Almost in a perverse way,” he added, “I wish it had been undue influence, because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that. The fact that it wasn’t tells me that we’ve got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong, and we’ve got to figure out what was there.”

Cirincione, one author of a much-discussed recent report criticizing the Bush administration’s use of Iraq intelligence, rejected Kay’s claim that assessments of the Iraqi threat were largely constant in recent years (see GSN, Jan. 8).

“The October [2002] NIE [national intelligence estimate] represented a dramatic change in the intelligence assessment and differed in many ways from all previous intelligence estimates,” said Cirincione, adding that many experts believe a strong “circumstantial case” points to Bush administration pressure as the source of the change.

As one example of pre-October 2002 intelligence that contradicted NIE characterizations of the Iraqi threat, Cirincione cited a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment dated September 2002 that is “much more cautious than the NIE and points out that there is no hard evidence on any chemical or biological weapons production or stockpile, period.”

In any case, said Cirincione, “Kay is really not in a position to judge this. He has not done an investigation of this issue. He came in after the intelligence assessments, after the war, and before that, he was a perfectly willing participant in the exaggeration of the threat.”

Faced with Kay’s insistence that no major, sudden change in Iraq intelligence assessment followed Sept. 11, Levin asked Kay to review intelligence assessments issued before and after Sept. 11 in order to establish whether such a change took place. The request prompted a bemused response from Kay.

“Senator Levin,” said Kay, “I’m always happy to take homework assignments from you. I hope it comes with an address for one of those undisclosed locations.”

Despite general support for administration conduct, Kay directly contradicted at least one administration claim: Cheney’s assertion last week that trailers found last year in Iraq were mobile biological weapon laboratories. Cheney’s interpretation was for a time common among U.S. intelligence analysts but has since been widely discredited.

“I think the consensus opinion is that when you look at those two trailers, while they had capabilities in many areas, their actual intended use was not for the production of biological weapons,” Kay said when questioned by Levin about the vice president’s remarks.

Levin and other Democrats are calling for an outside inquiry into the administration’s use of intelligence, something Levin said yesterday is not being explored in a current Senate intelligence committee investigation of Iraq intelligence. Kay appeared to concur in part, saying senators are likely to conclude over time that an outside inquiry is needed.

Such remarks prompted Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (Kan.), who is also a member of the Armed Services Committee, to “take umbrage” at the challenge to the intelligence panel, which he described as conducting an “outside,” “independent” inquiry despite suggestions to the contrary.

According to Cirincione, the report from Roberts’ committee appears likely to fault intelligence agencies, not policy-makers. Cirincione likened current criticism of the CIA and its director, George Tenet, to the conduct of former President Richard Nixon’s administration toward top adviser John Dean. In  1973, Dean alleged the administration was trying to make him a “scapegoat” and identified Nixon as a participant in the Watergate cover-up.

“They’re looking for somebody to hold the bag, and they’ve cast George Tenet in the role of John Dean,” Cirincione said.

Inspector Plays Down Possibility of Future Finds

Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.) vigorously disputed Kay’s assertion that those who expected to find weapons in Iraq were wrong, stressing the possibility that weapons could still be found and the need to “hold … conclusions in abeyance.”

Kay acknowledged the “theoretical possibility” of a future WMD find but cautioned that the United States should not delay facing up to its intelligence failure in Iraq in the hope that the “unresolvable ambiguity” around Hussein’s weapon programs will someday be resolved.

“I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons there,” Kay said.

“Is it theoretically possible, in a country as vast as that, that they’re hidden? It’s theoretically possible, but we went after this not in the way of trying to find where the weapons are hidden. When you don’t find them in the obvious places, you look to see ― Were they produced? Were there people that produced them?  Were there the inputs to the production process?” he said.

“When the ISG wraps up its work, whether it be six months or six years from now, there are still going to be people to say, ‘You didn't look everywhere. Isn’t it possible it was hidden someplace?’ and the answer has got to be, honestly, ‘Yes, it’s possible,’ but you try to eliminate that by this other process,” he said.

Warner also questioned Kay about the possibility of a WMD transfer from Hussein’s government to al-Qaeda or another terrorist group.

“There’s no evidence that I know or that I can think of” that such a possibility existed, Kay said.