“Clearly the intelligence that we went to war on was inaccurate, wrong,” Kay told NBC TV January 28. “I think if anyone was abused by the intelligence, it was the president of the United States rather than the other way around.” “I came not from within the administration,” Kay said, adding that he had been subjected to “absolutely no pressure” before, during, or after his inspections work.

Kay spoke as the former head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG). Formed by the occupying powers in mid-2003, the ISG organized some 1,400 U.S., British, and Australian personnel in the hunt for Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.”

“If the weapons program existed on the scale we anticipated,” Kay told the Washington Post, “we would have found something that leads to that conclusion. Instead, we found other evidence that points to something else.” That is, documents and testimony from Iraqis that Saddam Hussein’s regime had disarmed “at least partially before 1998,” in the words of the Post.

“We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” Kay told the Senate committee. Furthermore, he said, this was a reasonable conclusion based on the “limited data.” He noted that the “French president, Chirac… referred to Iraq’s possession of WMD [weapons of mass destruction],” and Berlin’s “intelligence service believed that there were WMD.”

In his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush said his administration had evidence Hussein had sought uranium from a West African country. This assertion, based on CIA and British intelligence agencies, was prominent in the administration’s justification for the war.

Kay encouraged the committee to help “ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future…. I don’t think the problem of global proliferation of weapons technology of mass destruction is going to go away, and that’s why I think it is an urgent issue.”

At the same time, Kay emphasized, “In my judgment, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of resolution 1441”—the U.S. and British-sponsored UN Security Council resolution of 2002 that placed an ultimatum on Baghdad to list its weapons programs. The resolution rubber-stamped the U.S. government preparations to invade.

There were “multiple reasons” for the spies’ misinformation, said Kay. “Proliferation is a hard thing to track, particularly in countries that deny easy and free access and don’t have free and open societies.”

On January 23, before his round of interviews and testimony, Kay had resigned as the head of the ISG. Paying tribute to his successor, Charles Duelfer—a former deputy head of the United Nations Special Commission weapons inspection team—Kay told the Senate committee that when the ISG has finished its surveys, “there’s still going to be an unresolvable ambiguity about what happened.”

He placed much of the blame for this “ambiguity” on the “Ali Baba looting” that followed the invasion, “designed by [Saddam Hussein’s] security services to cover the tracks of the Iraqi WMD program.

“I’ve seen looting around the world and thought I knew the best looters in the world,” Kay said arrogantly. “The Iraqis excel at that.”

“We’re also in a period in which we’ve had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go the other way,” Kay said. Recent revelations had shown that spies had underestimated the extent of the Iranian and Libyan programs to develop nuclear weapons, he stated—implying that this was a more dangerous error than the exaggeration of the danger presented by Iraq.“Privately,” noted USA Today reporter John Diamond, “two high-ranking administration officials said they were heartened that Kay is not blaming Bush for the intelligence failure.”

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice echoed Kay’s points in appearances on television talk shows January 30. She told NBC’s “Today Show” that spy agencies in many countries had stated that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction. “When you have a case of a very dangerous man, in a very dangerous part of the world, who refuses to account for large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and who has used them before, I don’t know how you come to any other conclusion but that he has weapons of mass destruction,” she said. Hussein “was a dangerous man,” Rice added. “The world is better off without him.”

Speaking on CBS’s “Early Show,” Rice said: “What we have is evidence that there are differences between what we knew going in and what we found on the ground. But that’s not surprising in a country that was as closed and secretive as Iraq.”

U.S. president George Bush told reporters that he stood by statements in the lead-up to war, using Kay’s comments to back up his assertion. Hussein, Bush said, was “a grave and gathering danger—that’s what I said. And I believed it then, and I know it was true now. And as Mr. Kay said, that Iraq was a dangerous place.”

After Bush initially rejected Kay’s call for an independent inquiry into the performance of the spy agencies, U.S. officials announced February 2 that the president plans to set up a bipartisan investigation. The White House will set the commission’s terms and appoint its members.

According to the BBC, “Bush administration officials…said the inquiry would address the way security services received information about secretive regimes seen as a threat to the U.S. such as north Korea and Libya, as well as groups like al Qaeda.”

In his January 20 State of the Union address, Bush focused his rationalizations for the Iraq war on invocations of “freedom” and “democracy” that the forces occupying Iraq are supposedly heralding in the Middle East. “The people of Iraq are free,” he said. “As democracy takes hold in Iraq, the enemies of freedom will do all in their power to spread violence and fear…. The killers will fail, and the Iraqi people will live in freedom.”

While backing Washington’s “war on terrorism,” liberal politicians used Kay’s statements to buttress their “anti-Bush” campaigns. Front-runner for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, John Kerry, said: “we were told by the administration the Iraqis have a 45-minute capacity to deploy weapons of mass destruction. They didn’t.”

Kerry’s chief rival, Howard Dean, charged that Vice President Richard Cheney had pressured CIA analysts to provide intelligence reports that would support the administration’s case for war against Iraq.  
 
 
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