Kay Blames Weak Intel in Iraq WMD Failure

[adios]

Interesting article about Kay's testimony today. I couple of relevant quotes regarding the Democrats unsubstantiated and wild charges about the administration fabricating WMD intelligence:

But Kay denied suggestions by Democrats that intelligence analysts felt pressured by the administration to shape intelligence to help President Bush (news - web sites) make the case for war. He said he spoke to many analysts who prepared the intelligence and "not in a single case was the explanation that I was pressured to this."

The next one from the leftists should be that David Kay is part of the conspiracy.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said his committee has finished a draft report on its inquiry into the prewar intelligence and plans to get it to members next week.


He said it appears the problem is with some intelligence agencies and not the policy-makers. "Anyone who believes otherwise has not done their homework and certainly was not listening to Dr. Kay," he said.

He's part of the conspiracy too /images/graemlins/smile.gif.

Kay Blames Weak Intel in Iraq WMD Failure (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=2&u=/ap/20040128/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq_weapons_040127184120)

Kay Blames Weak Intel in Iraq WMD Failure
45 minutes ago Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo!


By KATHERINE PFLEGER, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told members of the Senate Wednesday that the failure to turn up weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (news - web sites) exposed weaknesses in America's intelligence-gathering apparatus.

"We've had a number of surprises," Kay told reporters after meeting behind closed doors with the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It's quite clear we need capabilities that we do not have with regard to intelligence."


Later, he told the Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites) that "we were almost all wrong — and I certainly include myself here," in believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.


But Kay denied suggestions by Democrats that intelligence analysts felt pressured by the administration to shape intelligence to help President Bush (news - web sites) make the case for war. He said he spoke to many analysts who prepared the intelligence and "not in a single case was the explanation that I was pressured to this."


Kay also said despite no evidence of weapons stockpiles, Iraqi documents, physical evidence and interviews with Iraqi scientists revealed that Iraq was engaged in weapons programs prohibited by U.N. resolutions.


Senators have been anxious to speak to Kay, one of a number of U.S. officials who have recently adjusted their positions on Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s military capabilities. The Bush administration cited a threat from such weapons as a principle justification for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam last year.


As special adviser to CIA (news - web sites) Director George Tenet, Kay was chosen last year as the Iraq Survey Group leader in part because he was convinced weapons would be found. "My suspicions are that we'll find in the chemical and biological areas, in fact, I think there may be some surprises coming rather quickly in that area," he said on CNN in June.


Kay resigned Friday, saying he was stepping down because resources were being shifted away from the search.


Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services panel, called the hearing to receive Kay's views directly. Before sitting down with Warner's committee, Kay told reporters he believes the work of the Iraq survey group must continue.


Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said: "Tis a quandary. We're at war and people are dying every day. We went to war on the presumption that we were going to be attacked very soon if we didn't do something and the reign of terror would come from weapons of mass destruction. I'm still in search of those weapons of mass destruction."


Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said his committee has finished a draft report on its inquiry into the prewar intelligence and plans to get it to members next week.


He said it appears the problem is with some intelligence agencies and not the policy-makers. "Anyone who believes otherwise has not done their homework and certainly was not listening to Dr. Kay," he said.


"I still have a fundamental question that nobody has quite answered yet," said Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss. "We know he had biological and chemical weapons in the early 1990s. What happened to them? Did they move to another country? Were they destroyed? There are indications that maybe some of them have been eliminated."


A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday that it's premature to speculate about "why we were wrong," and rejected Kay's statement that the work in Iraq is 85 percent done.


While inspectors have been unable to unearth weapons of mass destruction, they have found new evidence that Saddam's regime quietly destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s, Kay told The Washington Post in an interview in Tuesday editions.


Democratic presidential contenders have grabbed onto Kay's conclusion on the absence of banned weapons.


"The administration did cook the books," Howard Dean (news - web sites) told reporters Tuesday. "I think that's pretty serious."





Kay's resignation and subsequent statements come as many in the administration subtly are changing their assertions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, including Bush. In last year's State of the Union, Bush called Saddam a "dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons."

In the State of the Union this month, Bush spoke of Saddam's programs, rather than weapons: "Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day. "

Last February, Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) told the United Nations (news - web sites) Security Council that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed "real and present dangers."

This weekend, Powell began to backpedal, saying the United States thought Saddam had banned weapons, but "we had questions that needed to be answered."

[andyfox]

"Kay denied suggestions by Democrats that intelligence analysts felt pressured by the administration to shape intelligence to help President Bush (news - web sites) make the case for war. He said he spoke to many analysts who prepared the intelligence and 'not in a single case was the explanation that I was pressured to this.'"

James Fallows, in his Atlantic article, didn't claim that the administration pressured the intelligence community to doctor their intelligence, but rather that it selected the intelligence, without regard to the intel community's judgment as to the reliability of the information, that suited it's case. To the point where they sent their own people to CIA HQ and refused to let their people attend meetings where they might here contradicting information.

Anyway, it would be SOP to put the blame on the intel community rather than the people running for reelection. This was classic in Vietnam with Lyndon Johnson and his band or liars.

And SOP for the opposition party to play it for political gain.

[adios]

Great insight into David Kay and his reports. I especially liked the last line. For some it only takes one 9/11, for others 2, .... for others there aren't enough:


So Where's the WMD? (http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110004612)

So Where's the WMD?
Anti-Bush partisans aren't listening to what David Kay is saying.

Wednesday, January 28, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Iraq weapons inspector David Kay speaks to the Senate today, and our (probably forlorn) hope is that his remarks will get wide and detailed coverage. What we've been hearing from him in snippets so far explains the mystery of whatever happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

His answers, we should make clear, are a long way from the "Bush and Blair lied" paradigm currently animating the Democratic primaries and newspapers. John Kerry of all people now claims that, because Mr. Kay's Iraq Study Group has not found stockpiles of WMD or a mature nuclear program, President Bush somehow "misled" the country. "I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception," he said on "Fox News Sunday." This is the same Senator who voted for the war after having access to the intelligence and has himself said previously that he believed Saddam had such weapons.

The reason Mr. Kerry believed this is because everybody else did too. That Saddam had WMD was the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community for years, going back well into the Clinton Administration. The CIA's Near East and counterterrorism bureaus disagreed on the links between al Qaeda and Saddam--which is one reason the Bush Administration failed to push that theme. But the CIA and its intelligence brethren were united in their belief that Saddam had WMD, as the agency made clear in numerous briefings to Congress.

And not just the CIA. Believers included the U.N., whose inspectors were tossed out of Iraq after they had recorded huge stockpiles after the Gulf War. No less than French President Jacques Chirac warned as late as last February about "the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq" and declared that the "international community is right . . . in having decided Iraq should be disarmed."





All of this was enshrined in U.N. Resolution 1441, which ordered Saddam to come completely clean about his weapons. If he really had already destroyed all of his WMD, Saddam had every incentive to give U.N. inspectors free rein, put everything on the table and live to deceive another day. That he didn't may go down as Saddam's last and greatest miscalculation.
But Mr. Kay's Study Group has also discovered plenty to suggest that Saddam couldn't come clean because he knew he wasn't. In his interim report last year, Mr. Kay disclosed a previously unknown Iraq program for long-range missiles; this was a direct violation of U.N. resolutions.

Mr. Kay has also speculated that Saddam may have thought he had WMD because his own generals and scientists lied to him. "The scientists were able to fake programs," the chief inspector says. This is entirely plausible, because aides who didn't tell Saddam what he wanted to hear were often tortured and killed. We know from post-invasion interrogations that Saddam's own generals believed that Iraq had WMD. If they thought so, it's hard to fault the CIA for believing it too.

Mr. Kay has also made clear that, stockpiles or no, Saddam's regime retained active programs that could have been reconstituted at any time. Saddam tried to restart his nuclear program as recently as 2001. There is also evidence, Mr. Kay has told the London Telegraph, that some components of Saddam's WMD program "went to Syria before the war." Precisely what and how much "is a major issue that needs to be resolved." The most logical conclusion is that Saddam hoped to do just enough to satisfy U.N. inspectors and then restart his WMD production once sanctions were lifted and the international heat was off.





By all means let Congress explore why the CIA overestimated Saddam's WMD stockpiles this time around. But let's do so while recalling that the CIA had underestimated the progress of his nuclear, chemical and biological programs before the first Gulf War. We are also now learning that the CIA has long underestimated the extent and progress of nuclear programs in both Libya and Iran. Why aren't Democrats and liberals just as alarmed about those intelligence failures?
Intelligence is as much art and judgment as it is science, and it is inherently uncertain. We elect Presidents and legislators to consider the evidence and then make difficult policy judgments that the voters can later hold them responsible for. Mr. Kay told National Public Radio that, based on the evidence he has seen from Iraq, "I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat." He added that "I must say I actually think what we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially, than in fact we thought it was even before the war."

As intelligence failures go, we'd prefer one that worried too much about a threat than one that worried too little. The latter got us September 11.

[andyfox]

I especially dislike the last line. It implies that not going to war would have left us suscpetible to another 9/11. It's entirely possible that going to war has made us more susceptible to another 9/11. Hussein's connection to 9/11 is a myth. Even the administration doesn't invoke it any more.

I like this sentence much better, despite the fact that it ends in a preposition:

"We elect Presidents and legislators to consider the evidence and then make difficult policy judgments that the voters can later hold them responsible for."

My contention is that the President did not consider the evidence prudently. That other factors influenced his decision, which very well may have been made long before 9/11.

[Wake up CALL]

[ QUOTE ]
It implies that not going to war would have left us suscpetible to another 9/11. It's entirely possible that going to war has made us more susceptible to another 9/11.

[/ QUOTE ]

Andy you have written this more times than I am able to count yet have never been able to justify the arguement. This line of thought for lack of a better term is simply goofy.

[adios]

[ QUOTE ]
Andy you have written this more times than I am able to count yet have never been able to justify the arguement. This line of thought for lack of a better term is simply goofy.

[/ QUOTE ]

What Andy is apparently advocating is Clinton type responses to terrorist attacks against US entities (like sending a couple of cruise missles to a place where you think an al Qaeda camp might be). We saw the effectiveness of those responses on 9/11.