Kay calls on Bush to 'come clean' about WMD
Former weapons inspector says White House must admit it was wrong before US can move on.
In an interview with the
Guardian newspaper published Wednesday, David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, said it was time for President Bush to "
come clean with the American people" and admit that he and his administration were wrong about the presence of WMD in Iraq.
Mr Kay said that continued evasion would create public cynicism about the administration's motives, which he believes reflected a genuine fear of WMD falling into the hands of terrorists. He also said that if the administration did not confront the Iraq intelligence fiasco head-on it would undermine its credibility with its allies in future crises "for a generation".
Kay says he now believes that any weapons that Iraq did possess
were destroyed by 1998. Any programs that were continued, he added, were driven more by "corruption" than by "purposefully directed weapons programs." Kay, who still very much admires President Bush according to the
Guardian, thinks Mr. Bush went to war for in good faith because he thought Iraq was "a threat to the American people." Bush needs to be honest with the American people about WMD, But Kay believes he is being prevented from doing this by the Department of Defense, and the CIA.
"When you don't say you got it wrong, it leads to the general belief that you manipulated the intelligence and so you did it for some other purpose. I'm afraid that's going to turn out to be because the administration is having such a hard time in saying the intelligence is wrong. And the other thing is it makes it very difficult for relations with allies. I think we lost the credibility of our intelligence. The next time you have to go and shout there's fire in the theatre people are going to doubt it," Kay says.
USA Today reported Tuesday that a
report from UN weapons inspectors to be released this week says they now believe there were
no weapons of mass destruction of any significance in Iraq after 1994. The report, which will be presented to the UN Security Council Friday, is the first outside study that confirms the statements Kay made in January to the US Senate. At that time, Kay told a Senate committee that he believed there were no WMD in Iraq.
Demetrius Perricos, the acting executive chairman of the UN inspection teams, said in an interview that the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq since the war undercuts administration criticism of the UN's search before the war. "You cannot say that only the Americans or the British or the Australians currently inspecting in Iraq are the clever inspectors – and the Americans and the British and the Australians that we had were not," he said. The UN report, prepared by the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as
UNMOVIC, also noted that
a lack of cooperation by the United States had stymied UN efforts since the end of "major combat" in Iraq to completely account for Iraqi weapons.
Reuters reported Tuesday that US officials never gave the commission a copy of Kay's most recent findings on Iraqi weapons, and the US failed to seek any UN information for Kay's Iraq Survey Group.
In an interview this week with
CNN, Vice President Dick Cheney continued to insist that, despite the statements by Kay and UNMOVIC, inspections teams
might still find WMD in Iraq.
The Iraqi Survey Group will be at work there probably for a couple more years before we'll be able to completely resolve all those outstanding questions. But we do know he had capability. David Kay said he had capability. David Kay said he was capable of producing biological weapons in relatively short order. He had the technology; he had the technical experts to do it; he had the basic raw materials, the labs, whatever he needed to produce biological weapons. In Australia, meanwhile, Prime Minister John Howard has refused to apologize to parliament, despite a report which found he overstated the case for war. Melbourne's
The Age reports that the parliamentary report found Australia's key intelligence agencies
had doubts about Iraq's WMD program and their assessments did not back up the government's case. Like the Bush administration, Mr. Howard has gradually moved away from using WMD as the primary justification for the war. "Although our case was based on non-compliance with UN resolutions and the WMD issue ... I also placed very heavy reliance on the importance of the American alliance," Mr. Howard said.
Pat Holt, writing in an opinion piece in
The Christian Science Monitor, says that the whole issue of WMD can now be inducted into the "
Intelligence Twisting Hall of Fame" alongside other such events as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the Iran-Contra scandal.
The lesson that runs through these and other mishaps of US foreign policy is that policy ought to be built on intelligence and not the other way around. If intelligence is shaped or distorted to support predetermined policy, trouble is sure to follow. Intelligence analysts can be, and sometimes are, mistaken. They sometimes have their own axes to grind. There is no simple solution to the conflict between policymaker and intelligence analyst. It would help to have a more alert Congress, more willing to do battle with the White House or the intelligence community. It would help even more to have a president more willing to admit the possibility of error. But that is perhaps asking too much.
Finally, the
Independent reports on Thursday that, in a growing UK controversy about legality of the Iraq war, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith's secret legal advice on Iraq conceded that a key United Nations resolution on the issue
did not automatically authorize war. A Foreign Office memo, which was submitted to a select House of Commons committee, giving detailed reasons behind Lord Goldsmith's opinion, made clear that there was no "automaticity" in resolution 1441 to justify the use of force, the position that was publicly espoused by France, Germany, Russia and others. Resolution 1441 was the United Nations resolution used by both the US and the UK to justify the war in Iraq.
Also...
•
My son the suicide bomber (
BBC)
•
Top BBC resignations astonished Hutton (
Guardian)
•
9/11 panel rejects White House limits on interviews (
New York Times)
•
Injured US soldier's claim raises thorny legal issues (
Associated Press)
•
Going to fight in Iraq? Lessons from an infantry company commander (
Army Times)
• Feedback appreciated. E-mail
Tom Regan
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