On being wrong: Testimony from David Kay you haven’t heard

David Kay’s testimony before the Senate last week was a bombshell. As the hand-picked head of the Iraq Survey Group, and the chief nuclear weapons inspector for the UN in Iraq during the 1990s, this man knows more about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs than just about anyone else on the planet—even Saddam Hussein. So when David Kay said we were wrong about Iraq’s WMD, it set off shockwaves that will ripple all the way to election day.

Kay’s judgment that Iraq did not possess large caches of chemical or biological weapons before the war—and that no “smoking gun” is likely to be found—has been widely reported. Democratic presidential hopefuls have had a field day with this, and the cry of “Bush lied” has grown to a crescendo.

But what did David Kay actually say? His prepared remarks were followed by a detailed question and answer session and I’ve taken the liberty here of compiling some of those remarks. I did clip, shorten and shuffle, but honestly sought to preserve his meaning in each case. My selections can be faulted, to be sure, so I encourage you to read the entire fascinating transcript yourself at http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KAY401A.html.

Here’s what he said on being wrong: “I think there were no large stockpiles of WMD. . . It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.” But he said much more than that. When taken in its totality, David Kay’s testimony buttresses—rather than weakens—the U.S. case for war.

On being wrong by underestimating: “We've had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go the other way. The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the Iranians admit was 18 years on, that we underestimated. . .The Libyan program recently discovered was far more extensive than was assessed. There's a long record here of being wrong.”

On risk after 9-11: “If I had been there, presented [with] the intelligence estimates, I would have come to the same conclusion that the political leaders did. . . Any president has got to make a choice about how much risk he's prepared to run for the nation that he leads. It is my belief that regardless of political party, 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.”

On whether or not Iraq had a WMD program: “Let me be absolutely clear about it -- Iraq was in clear and material violation of 1441. They maintained programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their program. We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited.”

On what ‘WMD program-related-activities’ means: “That includes a program to develop a substitute for a major precursor for VX [nerve gas]. It includes a study on a simulant for anthrax [which] pushed ahead about two generations the production capability. . . They had looked at the lethality of various agents and classified them. . . The missile program was actually moving ahead and I continue to emphasize I think we paid inadequate attention to [it].”

On what happened to the WMD stockpiles: “They kept the scientists and technology, but they came to [the] conclusion: ‘Why keep stockpiles of weapons that are vulnerable to inspectors when you've lost your delivery capability? Wait till you have your delivery capability, and then it's a relatively short order.’”

On the Iraqi nuclear program: “You have to realize, this was a country that had designed and gone through a decade-long nuclear program. They knew the secrets. . . Given their history, it was certainly an emerging program [although] it was not yet up as a full nuclear production site again. . . Fortunately, from my point of view, Operation Iraqi Freedom intervened and we don't know how or how fast [their nuclear program] would have gone ahead.”

On the danger that Saddam’s regime posed: “I actually think this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought. . . In a world where we know others are seeking WMD, the likelihood at some point in the future of a seller and a buyer meeting up would have made that a far more dangerous country than even we assessed. . . I think the way the [Iraqi] society was going, and the number of willing buyers in the market, that that probably was a risk that--if we did avoid--we barely avoided.”

T.T.

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