'We Were All Wrong'
The failure to turn up weapons of mass destruction fuels debate over who's to blame
When it came to the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, David Kay used to be a true believer. "Iraq stands in clear violation of international orders to rid itself of these weapons," Kay told U.S. News in September 2002, expressing particular fear over Saddam's biological arsenal. Before the war, Pentagon officials seeking to press the case for war would even steer reporters toward Kay--a respected scientist who had once served as a United Nations weapons inspector.
But by the time Kay testified to Congress last week, he had clearly changed his mind. "It turns out we were all wrong," he said in the kind of mea culpa rarely heard in Washington. During his seven months as the CIA's chief weapons sleuth, his team failed to turn up any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. "I think there were no large stockpiles of WMD," he added.
His admission has also reignited a partisan firestorm over who deserves blame. Kay castigated U.S. intelligence agencies--and tried to absolve the Bush administration of accusations that it had politicized the intelligence. The Republican-controlled House and Senate intelligence committees are working on draft reports that offer similar conclusions, putting new pressure on CIA Director George Tenet. "We have a credibility crisis," says Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.
Democrats on Capitol Hill are also calling for investigations into whether the Bush administration exaggerated and manipulated the intelligence to bolster its case for war. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials, on the defensive, pointed out that Kay has turned up evidence of Iraq's continuing interest in developing WMD--as well as acts of self-deception or bluffing among the Iraqi leadership--while also insisting that the hunt for actual weapons is far from complete.
Having it both ways? Many experts are puzzled by Kay's exoneration of the Bush administration. "Kay is trying to have it both ways," says critic Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "He's trying to honestly report what he found and still support the administration's case that it was right to go to war." Some have even questioned the motives of Kay, who in the last four years has given political contributions to both President Bush and the Republican National Committee.
What has been lost in this recent round of finger-pointing is just how much dissent there was inside the intelligence community. Perhaps the most pivotal document was the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons in October 2002. The report, produced in record time, was significantly more conclusive than previous assessments, asserting that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons and had probably resumed building nuclear weapons. But the shifts weren't based on new data. "The intelligence community, for the most part, talked about estimates and judgments, rather than solid evidence," says Greg Thielmann, who retired as acting director of the nonproliferation office in the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau as the NIE was being drafted. That office and the Energy Department, in fact, vigorously disputed the NIE's conclusion that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. In all, there were some 40 different caveats and dissents included in the NIE, according to a study by the Carnegie Endowment.
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