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Iraq Weapons Data Flawed, Congress Told

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Times Staff Writer

David Kay, the former chief American weapons hunter in Iraq, told Congress on Wednesday that U.S. intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s suspected weapons of mass destruction was fundamentally flawed before the war but was not deliberately distorted. He called for the creation of an independent commission to study the failure and recommend reforms.

“It turns out we were all wrong, in my judgment,” Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee in his first public testimony since he resigned Friday as head of the Iraq Survey Group. “And that is most disturbing.”

Kay said Washington also had misread recent intelligence on Iran and Libya and had failed to recognize how far those countries had gone in developing nuclear and other clandestine weapons programs. He compared the misreading of intelligence in Iraq to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

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“There’s a long record here of being wrong,” said Kay, who had served since June as special advisor to CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Despite stark warnings by the Bush administration that Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction, Kay said his teams had found no stockpiles of chemical or biological agents in Iraq and no evidence that Baghdad had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. He also said he knew of no evidence indicating that the regime had transferred illicit weapons or technology to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.

But Kay said looting after the war, as well as mounting corruption in the regime since 1998, had sharply raised the danger of such proliferation. It was “a risk if we did avoid, we barely avoided,” he said.

Kay blamed “major shortfalls” in U.S. intelligence collection and analysis before the war, saying America relied too heavily on high-altitude satellite images and other technical means of gathering information. U.S. officials based some of their analysis of Iraqi weaponry on faulty production records collected by the United Nations.

“Some of it was simply accounting errors,” Kay said.

He said his investigators now knew “probably 85% of the major elements” of Iraq’s illicit weapons efforts. The “biggest unknown” remains the international smuggling networks that helped procure raw materials and other supplies for Baghdad, he said. Some questions, he warned, might never be answered because of the postwar looting and destruction.

As for critics’ charges that the administration had pressured U.S. intelligence analysts to shade their assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs to justify a war, Kay said he had found no evidence to support such claims.

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“I deeply think that is the wrong explanation,” Kay said. He added: “I wish it had been undue influence, because we know how to correct that. We get rid of people.”

He said he had “numerous analysts come up to me in apology” for their inaccurate prewar assessments. Not one, he said, had complained of “inappropriate command interference.”

Kay touched on some of the items found in Iraq, perhaps most notably two large trucks filled with laboratory equipment. He said the “consensus opinion” of U.S. intelligence experts now was that the vehicles were “not for production of biological agents.” Vice President Dick Cheney last week said in a radio interview that the vehicles, recovered in northern Iraq in April, were “conclusive evidence” of a germ warfare program. A CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, disputed both Kay and Cheney, saying there was no clear consensus on the issue.

Kay said it now appeared that the combination of U.S. bombing in 1991 and 1998, seven years of U.N. inspections and Iraq’s own arms-destruction programs in the early 1990s had eliminated any stockpiles of illicit weapons long ago. But he said Hussein “kept the scientists and kept the capability” to restart his programs and thus remained a threat.

Kay said interrogations of Iraqi scientists and officials captured since the war indicated that Hussein knew he no longer possessed any chemical or biological weapons, but “he believed they could turn the tap back on rather quickly. It turns out they lied [to Hussein] about how quickly they could turn it back on.”

Kay said the CIA, other Western intelligence agencies and U.N. weapons inspectors had failed to realize that Hussein was “pursuing a course of constructive ambiguity” -- that is, bluffing -- about weapons of mass destruction after the mid-1990s in an effort to frighten his rivals at home and in Iran, boost his prestige in the Arab world and deter a Western attack.

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“He wanted to enjoy the benefits of people thinking he had them,” Kay said. He said it remained a “mystery” why Hussein would take a risk that ultimately cost him his reign, his freedom and his sons’ lives if he didn’t possess the weapons.

Kay’s resignation and surprisingly sharp criticism of the prewar intelligence comes as President Bush and several of his top aides have begun to back away from their claims of the last year that Iraq had actively produced and deployed large quantities of nerve gases and germ weapons before the war.

On Tuesday, Bush didn’t answer directly when reporters asked if he still believed that illicit weapons would be found in Iraq. He instead defended his decision to invade, saying Hussein was a “grave and gathering threat to America and the world.”

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who told the U.N. Security Council in February that Iraq’s secret arsenal of weapons posed “real and present dangers,” said this week that the issue was now an “open question.”

In his State of the Union speech this month, the president said little about the topic other than to note that Kay had found “weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities.”

Kay said he resigned because translators and other resources were increasingly shifted away from the Iraq Survey Group last fall to help the U.S. military battle insurgents in Iraq. He said he was in “running battles” with the Pentagon and the intelligence community in September. “By November, I had lost that battle,” he said.

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In response to questions from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Kay called for an independent commission to look into how the intelligence community erred in its prewar judgments. Kay said a separate inquiry was needed “to give the American people confidence.”

McCain previously bucked party leadership and the White House to cosponsor the legislation that created the independent commission probing the government’s failure to anticipate or prevent the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, sharply disputed the need for a separate inquiry. The Senate and House intelligence committees are both investigating prewar intelligence on Iraq, and Roberts said his committee members would get a 300-page draft report next week.

Kay’s sharp criticism has caught officials in the intelligence community off-guard, with some saying it has hurt morale at the CIA. Analysts and other officials defended their assessments on Iraq, saying they were prudent to assume Iraq was building and hiding illicit weapons given the country’s use of such weapons in the 1980s and its concealment efforts in the ‘90s.

But one senior intelligence official said he regretted that the agency didn’t do more to emphasize weaknesses in the underlying intelligence, and include more specific caveats in assessments aimed at policymakers.

“Maybe we should have couched things more,” the official said. “We should have harped on the fact that the nature of our evidence was such that we didn’t have a smoking gun, but that based on what we knew we came to these conclusions.”

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The CIA declined to comment on Kay’s remarks, but a U.S. intelligence official said: “It’s premature to reach any conclusions. The search for WMD continues, and there’s still plenty of work to do on the ground.”

Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, sparred with Kay several times during the hearing, urging him to revise his claims that no illicit weapons would be found.

“It is far too early to reach any final judgments or conclusions,” Warner said.

He said Kay’s replacement in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, has been asked to deliver a progress report in late March.

But Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), ranking member of the committee, said Kay’s findings “raise serious questions about the objectivity and accuracy of our intelligence.”

Times staff writers Greg Miller and Edwin Chen contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

EXCERPTS FROM KAY’S TESTIMONY

‘World Is Far Safer’

Let me begin by saying we were almost all wrong. 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 ... referred to Iraq’s possession of WMD.... It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment, and that is most disturbing....

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Certainly proliferation is a hard thing to track, particularly in countries that deny easy and free access and don’t have free and open societies.

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of Resolution 1441. Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities, one last chance to come clean about what it had. We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441....

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Now, let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation....

I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had.... 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....

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And let me really wrap up here with just a brief summary of what I think we are now facing in Iraq. I regret to say that I think at the end of the work of the ISG there is still going to be an unresolvable ambiguity about what happened....

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We’re really not going to be able to prove beyond the truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.

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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.

Is it theoretically possible, in a country as vast as that, that they’ve hidden? It’s theoretically possible....

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I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein. I have said -- I actually think this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought.

Source: Federal News Service

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