Crossing Interests

A New Embarrassment for the White House

By Alexander Gainem
Freelance Writer

28/01/2004 

David Kay’s findings could potentially embarrass both the Bush and Blair governments; regardless, whether banned weapons of mass destruction are ever found the Bush administration persists war was justified.

The Bush administration is about to bid Dr. David Kay, head of the US-led inspectors assigned to find Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD), goodbye. With his subsequent remarks that WMD may never be found in Iraq, regional analysts fear the focus on Iran and/or Syria may be heightened.

Alas, Dr. David Kay, who at one point was considered Washington’s most trusted point man in unearthing alleged Iraqi WMD, has resigned his commission. Rumors had been circling in European capitals that Kay was frustrated with the discrepancy between White House insistence on the existence of concealed WMD in Iraq and the realities he came to discover - that there have been no WMD in the country for years.

Kay led the strangely-named Iraq Survey Group, comprised of 400 seasoned non-conventional arms experts, former UN inspectors and military intelligence officers, as well as more than 1,500 support team members, which combed Iraq for the past eight months.

Kay’s resignation became official on January 25th, after eight months of detailed and aggressive searches throughout Iraq yielded nothing. But Kay’s frustrated resignation did not come without some controversial statements. “I don't think they [WMD] exist. The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist - we’ve got to deal with that difference and understand why. I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people,” Kay told National Public Radio on Sunday.

“Why could we all be so wrong?” Kay asked of his failure to find WMD that he had been sure were there just a year earlier. As an MSNBC special analyst in 2002, Kay had claimed matter-of-factly that his work as an UNSCOM inspector had given him an inside account of Iraq’s alleged deception and concealment of WMD.

Is Kay hinting at a drop in the US intelligence community’s integrity?

A quick review:

In early 2003, both the UK and US governments had vehemently insisted that Iraq had the following:

• 600 metric tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, VX and sarin

• 25,000 rockets and 15,000 artillery shells with chemical agents

• 30,000 liters of biological agents, including anthrax and other toxins that are easily deployable on missiles and other military hardware

• Mobile biological weapons-grade manufacturing labs

• Military drones fitted with chemical weapons spraying capabilities (much akin to crop dusters)

In his October report to Congress, Kay gave a preliminary report, which predominantly stated that Iraq did not have WMD. Some of the findings of Kay’s group included:

• Iraq’s nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991.

• Facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign.

• Equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

• “We have not yet been able to corroborate the existence of a mobile biological warfare production effort.” (Source: Kay)

• “Iraq did not have a large, ongoing, centrally-controlled chemical warfare program after 1991. Reduced, if not entirely destroyed” (Source: Kay)

• “We have not uncovered evidence that Iraq undertook significant post-1998 steps to actually build nuclear weapons or produce fissile materiel.” (Source: Kay)

The CIA acted quickly to cover the Kay gaffe and appointed Charles Duelfer, a former UNSCOM inspector, to the post. Duelfer joined UNSCOM in 1993 after a stint as a deputy assistant secretary in the political-military affairs section of the US State Department. For his part, Duelfer had told several US talk shows earlier in January that he did not believe banned weapons existed in Iraq. However, once news of his appointment was made public, Duelfer did an about-face and claimed that as head of the Iraq Survey Group he would have access to more information. He claimed he was only trying to discover the truth about Iraq’s WMD.

Privately, European intelligence officials believe that Duelfer is a tad too close to the Bush administration, having had private meetings with top-level officials in the White House.

Presidential hopeful Democratic Senator John Kerry used Kay’s statements to jump the Bush administration’s lies about the reasons for going to war. “It confirms what I have said for a long period of time, that we were misled - misled not only in the intelligence, but misled in the way that the president took us to war. I think there’s been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception,” Kerry told Fox Sunday.

In a further blow to Bush officials’ attempts to paint the Iraq war as a humanitarian one, Human Rights Watch blasted the decision to invade Iraq for “libertarian” reasons as stated by senior White House officials in light of the failure to unearth WMD.

“The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair,” said the Human Right Watch executive director Kenneth Roth in a statement posted on the organization’s website.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration remains unrelenting. On Monday, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the war was worth it because Iraq had “evil chemistry and evil biology.”

Alexander Gainem is a seasoned journalist who spent many years covering issues in the Middle East and Europe . He can be reached at alex_gainem@hotmail.com.

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