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by CNN
Monday, January 26, 2004 Posted:
10:55 AM EST (1555 GMT)
Former chief U.S. inspector faults
intelligence agencies
David Kay says
his investigation showed that Iraqi officials "had an intention to
continue to pursue their WMD activities."
CNN) -- Two days after resigning
as the Bush administration's top weapons inspector in Iraq, David Kay said
Sunday that his group found no evidence Iraq had stockpiled unconventional
weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March.
He said U.S. intelligence
services owe President Bush an explanation for having concluded that Iraq
had.
"My summary view, based on what
I've seen, is we're very unlikely to find large stockpiles of weapons," he
said on National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition." "I don't think they
exist."
It was the consensus among the
intelligence agencies that Iraq had such weapons that led Bush to conclude
that it posed an imminent threat that justified the U.S.-led invasion, Kay
said.
"I actually think the
intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing
the American people," he said.
"We have to remember that this
view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change
in the Bush administration," Kay said.
"It is not a political 'gotcha'
issue. It is a serious issue of 'How you can come to a conclusion that is
not matched in the future?'"
Other countries' intelligence
agencies shared the U.S. conclusion that Iraq had stockpiled such weapons,
though most disagreed with the United States about how best to respond.
Powell: Violations justified war
Asked if Iraq posed an imminent
threat to the United States at the time of the invasion, Kay said, "Based
on the intelligence that existed, I think it was reasonable to reach the
conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat."
Although his team concluded that
Iraq did not possess large amounts of weapons of mass destruction ready
for use, that does not necessarily mean it posed no imminent threat, he
said. "That is a political judgment, not a technical judgment."
Secretary of State Colin Powell
defended the administration's moves Sunday. "Military action was justified
by Iraq's violation of 12 years of U.N. resolutions," he said in an
interview with First Channel Russia during a visit to Moscow.
"Iraq had the intent to have
weapons of mass destruction and they had previously used weapons of mass
destruction. They had programs to develop such weapons," Powell said.
"And what we were trying to find
out was what inventory they actually had, and we are still examining that
question."
Saddam Hussein was given the
opportunity to divulge what his country was doing but chose not to do so,
which resulted in the U.S.-led campaign to oust him, Powell said.
"And the world is better off, the
Iraqi people are better off, because Saddam Hussein is gone," Powell said.
"And we will continue to make sure we find all elements of his weapons of
mass destruction programs and whatever weapons there might be."
Powell made the Bush
administration's case that Saddam's regime possessed such weapons in a
presentation to the U.N. Security Council last year.
Other failures
The discovery that Iran and Libya
had nuclear programs also appears to have caught intelligence agencies by
surprise, Kay said.
The Iranian program was uncovered
not by intelligence agencies but by Iranian defectors, he said.
Libya's program contained a
number of international clues, such as a connection to Pakistan and plants
in Malaysia. "It was, in many ways, the biggest surprise of all, and it
was missed," Kay said.
Last June, when he was appointed
to lead the U.S. effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Kay
expressed confidence they would be found.
Despite his group's failure to
unearth such weapons, those predictions have not embarrassed him, he said.
"They're coming back to haunt me
in the sense of why could we all be so wrong? ... It's an issue of the
capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful
information."
Kay said he would not submit a
final report on his work in Iraq, since the task of searching for weapons
will continue, led by Charles Duelfer, a longtime weapons inspector who
replaces Kay as the new CIA special adviser.
Despite not finding any WMD, Kay
said his team found that the Iraqi senior leadership "had an intention to
continue to pursue their WMD activities. That they, in fact, had a large
number of WMD-related activities."
Kay predicted investigators would
find that Iraqi scientists were "working on developing weapons or weapons
concepts that they had not moved into actual production."
Kay alleges Syria connection
Kay also raised the possibility
-- one he first discussed in a weekend interview with "The Sunday
Telegraph" of London -- that clues about banned weapons programs might
reside across Iraq's western border.
"There is ample evidence of
movement to Syria before the war -- satellite photographs, reports on the
ground of a constant stream of trucks, cars, rail traffic across the
border. We simply don't know what was moved," Kay said.
But, he said, "the Syrian
government there has shown absolutely no interest in helping us resolve
this issue."
Kay acknowledged that the truth
might never be revealed. Widespread looting in Baghdad after the invasion
destroyed many government records. "There's always going to be unresolved
ambiguity here."
Kay said he resigned after his
resources were diverted to other work from the exclusive goal of searching
for unconventional weapons.
"It's very hard to run
organizations with multiple missions, particularly if one half is
controlled by the Defense Department and one half is controlled by the
CIA. ... I thought that was the wrong thing to do."
Kay said he would like to write a
book dealing with the issue of proliferation and intelligence.
"I'm not doing a Paul O'Neill,"
he said, referring to the former Bush treasury secretary who was the
primary source for "The Price of Loyalty," a recent book that said the
Bush administration was planning to invade Iraq almost from the time Bush
took office.
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