Following a giddy weekend of "I told you so" and "We got him" and a lot of "high-fiveing" by Democrats and the liberal media, former United Nations Special Commission and later U.S. weapons inspector David Kay testified before the Congress yesterday.
For several days, headlines screamed: "Demolishing the WMD Theory" (Hartford Courant), "Iraq Posed No WMD Threat" (Seattle Post-Intelligencer), "Weasel Wording To Justify War" (Palm Beach Post) and my personal favorite, "Kay Report Makes French Look Good" (Dayton Daily News).
A survey of the top 20 newspapers by circulation found that as of Wednesday, 13 had run editorials on Kay's resignation as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq last Friday. They all featured his statement that no WMDs exist in Iraq and likely did not exist in Iraq during the U.S. run-up to war.
Nearly all of those papers blamed intelligence failures for the miscalculation and called for a full probe. But eight of the 13 also raised the issue of White House deceit and its possibly blind pursuit of intelligence that fit its plan for war.
Yesterday, David Kay got the chance to explain what he was selectively quoted as having said, plus what he actually did say and what it meant. A lot of the "high-fives" were apparently somewhat premature.
Kay remained composed, professional and fair despite the best efforts of Democratic senators – most notably Ted Kennedy and Carl Levin. They all tried to get Kay to agree with their carefully tuned agenda to blame the president for deliberately distorting the intelligence reports in order to start a war with Iraq.
Ted Kennedy and Levin began their "questions" with the equivalent of courtroom indictments of the Bush administration. They charged that it deliberately misled the country into falsely believing Iraq posed an imminent threat.
Kay answered by saying he spoke to many analysts who prepared the intelligence and "not in a single case was the explanation that I was pressured to this."
Instead, Kay stressed the danger posed by Saddam and said that Iraqi documents, physical evidence and interviews with Iraqi scientists revealed that Iraq was engaged in weapons programs prohibited by U.N. resolutions.
That little tidbit didn't make it into the editorial pages and news coverage about how the "Kay Report Makes the French Look Good" or any of the other "Gotcha" stories over the weekend.
Kay assigned most of the responsibility on the intelligence gathering agencies, which he said relied mostly on U.N. inspectors' reports instead of developing their own intelligence sources.
Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan pointed to repeated statements by top administration officials flatly stating that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. He pressed Kay to acknowledge that there is no evidence Iraq even had small stockpiles as of 2002. Kay pointed out that Saddam was working on developing a stockpile of the deadly poison, Ricin, which Sen. John McCain reminded the committee is a weapon of mass destruction. Fucking idiots
Kay told the committee that, now that Saddam is gone and we have more or less unfettered access, we know a lot more than the U.N. inspectors did, which makes any accusations valid only in hindsight.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said it appears the problem is with some intelligence agencies and not the policymakers. "Anyone who believes otherwise has not done his homework and certainly was not listening to Dr. Kay," he said.
The Democrats have hung their hopes for capturing the White House on the allegation that the administration was so gung-ho to go to war (for reasons that change almost daily) that it pressured the intelligence services to lie to support their conclusion.
They ignore the salient fact that it was a Clinton appointee, George Tenet, held over by the administration, who briefed both Presidents Clinton and Bush, and that both presidents cited that intelligence as sufficient cause for war. Clinton bombed the fleas out of Iraq in 1998 – the Bush administration merely finished the job in 2003.
The intelligence information regarding Saddam's WMD program had not substantially changed between 1998 and 2003. It was only after we actually got into Iraq that the assessments were proven wrong.
Kay was emphatic when he said that everybody, including himself, was wrong, based on the sum total of all the intelligence about Saddam gathered from the mid 1990s right up until the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
As I noted in a previous column , everybody in the Clinton administration and most leading Democrats – including Ted Kennedy, Carl Levin and Nancy Pelosi – made public statements prior to the invasion that intelligence indicated Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that they confidently proclaim that the Bush administration lied.
But if we follow their line of logic in the light of the true fact, it leads to only one conclusion: "If Bush lied, so did they."
Link: here
And remember the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998? This was Pre-Bush, yes?
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