Kay Backs Outside Probe of Iraq Data

            Ex-Inspector Again Says
           Forbidden Arms Probably Didn't Exist 

David Kay told a Senate committee it is 
 "important to acknowledge failure." 

           (Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)

By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 29, 2004; Page A0i

The former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday that there should be an independent investigation into the flawed intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons capability, fueling a partisan feud over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the former inspector, David Kay, said it is "important to acknowledge failure." Responding to questions from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), he said: "I must say, my personal view, and it's purely personal, is that in this case you will finally determine that it is going to take an outside inquiry, both to do it and to give yourself and the American people the confidence that you have done it."

The testimony, in which Kay repeated his previous assertions that stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction probably did not exist in Iraq, widened a rift between Democratic lawmakers and the White House and its GOP allies in Congress that promises to color this year's elections. The White House dismissed the notion of an outside investigation, saying that the U.S. inspectors in Iraq need more time and that the ouster of Hussein was justified regardless of the state of his weapons programs. Democrats suggested that the problem went beyond failed intelligence and involved an administration that exaggerated the threat Hussein posed.

In an extraordinary five days since resigning as head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), Kay has provided interviews and testimony that have returned the Iraq weapons issue to the center of the national debate. The White House, caught off guard by Kay's broad denunciation of the intelligence used to justify the war, has sought to defer the issue by refusing to acknowledge in public any flaw in the intelligence or a conclusive failure to find forbidden weapons in Iraq, urging that more searching is necessary.

Privately, White House officials are now acknowledging that there is a gap between their prewar claims about Iraq's weapons program and the inspectors' findings, essentially accepting Kay's assessment. They have directed the ISG, under the new leadership of Charles Duelfer, to switch its emphasis from finding weapons to discovering how the weapons were disposed. And they plan a broad internal review of intelligence-gathering practices, scrutinizing the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services to determine what new structures and methods must be used to prevent the same misjudgments from being made in other closed, totalitarian societies.

Some in the administration favor a frank public acknowledgment that the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, but that is not yet the prevailing view. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice is scheduled to appear today on news shows, in which she is expected to continue calling for more time to search.

Supporters and opponents of President Bush say this public strategy -- delaying a judgment on the weapons while justifying the war on other grounds -- is risky. By postponing a reckoning on the weapons, Bush is gambling that the news in Iraq will improve so that the American public will not be concerned about the weapons, that a weapons discovery will be made, or that the ISG will not finish its work until after the November elections. But Bush's strategy, they say, also allows the matter to linger as part of the presidential campaign and raises the possibility of the issue coming to a boil just before Election Day.

An aide to one of the Republican senators on the Armed Services Committee said the White House strategy is to "just kick the can down the road."

"The administration views the WMD issue as a liability only in the context of what the events are on the ground in Iraq," the aide said. "If this situation improves in Iraq, this question will be a dead letter." The aide said it is "unlikely" Duelfer will complete his report before the November elections.

Still, even hawks who had backed the administration on Iraq said it is not credible for the administration to deny that there was an intelligence failure. "I would acknowledge that it hasn't turned out, say we were surprised there were not active weapons of mass destruction deployments and he wasn't as far along as we anticipated," said Reagan administration arms-control official Kenneth Adelman, who serves on a Pentagon advisory panel. By postponing judgment, he added, "the harm is it keeps the story in the air for all too long."

In October, Kay said it would take another six to nine months to complete the weapons search in Iraq; and in the past week, he said the work of the ISG is 85 percent complete. But White House press secretary Scott McClellan said that is not necessarily the schedule under Duelfer.

McClellan dismissed the notion of an independent inquiry, saying the CIA is already investigating its intelligence gathering. "Before we can draw firm conclusions, we need to let the Iraq Survey Group complete its work," he said.

In his testimony and in interviews, Kay provided some ammunition to both sides. He agreed with Democrats that there should be an independent inquiry, and that any remaining ambiguity about Hussein's weapons capabilities should not be an excuse for delaying an investigation into an obvious intelligence failure.

But he also said the blame belongs solely to the intelligence community and that there was no sign that the administration pressured intelligence analysts to exaggerate the threat.

Kay said the U.S. intelligence effort was hobbled in part because it depended too much on high-tech surveillance methods and on foreign intelligence services, and didn't have enough informants in Iraq telling U.S. officials what was happening. In addition, Kay noted that the CIA had been criticized after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for not drawing proper conclusions from the information that it had, creating pressure on analysts to connect the dots, he said.

"We put the analysts under tremendous pressure, and the tendency is to overanalyze limited data" that they had on Iraqi weapons programs, Kay said. They should have said "get me more data," he said, "but in the wake of 9/11, believe me, that is difficult to do."

Kay continued yesterday to knock down many of the allegations that were central justifications for the war in Iraq. In an interview last week with National Public Radio, Vice President Cheney said the discovery of two semi-trailers in Iraq provided "conclusive evidence" that Hussein "did, in fact, have programs for weapons of mass destruction." But Kay said yesterday that "the consensus opinion is that, when you look at those two trailers, while they had capabilities in many areas, their actual intended use was not for the production of biological weapons."

Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), who led the Republican members' defense of the president, suggested that Hussein "posed an imminent threat" because there were findings that research was being done on ricin poisons and new missile systems.

Kay agreed that "the world is far safer" with the Iraqi leader's removal, but because his government after 1998 was "totally corrupt" and individual Iraqis, "out for their own protection," might sell weapons of mass destruction.

Minutes later, under questioning by Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), the panel's ranking Democrat, Kay said the inspectors had not found evidence of small stockpiles, but "we have got evidence that they certainly could have produced small amounts." Kay also said it is possible that small weapons caches are in Iraq "and we never find them."

Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.

 
© 2004 The Washington Post Company