WASHINGTON,
D.C. – U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) issued today’s “Bush Administration’s
Misstatement of the Day” on Iraq
and weapons of mass destruction.
Dr.
David Kay, who resigned as head of the U.S. team in charge of locating
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, said today in a New York Times
interview:
"I'm
personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced
weapons of mass destruction. We don't find the people, the documents or
the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was
going on. I think they [Iraq] gradually reduced stockpiles throughout
the 1990's. Somewhere in the mid-1990's, the large chemical overhang of
existing stockpiles was eliminated." (New York Times, 1/26/04)
The
statement by Dr. Kay, an international expert on weapons inspection, directly
contradicts President Bush and members of his cabinet, who used the threat
of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as the reason for going to war.
However, while justifying the war in Iraq, President Bush said during this
year's State of the Union that the United States has “…identified
dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.”
But before the war, President
Bush and members of his Administration did in fact state that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction:
-
“We
believe Saddam has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” – Vice President
Cheney (NBC “Meet the Press,” 3/16/03)
-
“There
can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability
to rapidly produce more, many more…Our conservative estimate is that Iraq
today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent.
That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets.” – Secretary of
State Colin Powell (Address before UN Security Council, 2/5/03)
-
“Our
intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to
produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.” – President
Bush (State of the Union Address, 1/28/03)
-
“Simply
stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends,
against our allies, and against us.” –Vice President Cheney (Speech to
VFW 103rd National Convention, 8/26/02)
Schakowsky
is an original cosponsor of H.R. 2625, legislation authored by U.S. Representative
Henry Waxman,
to create an independent commission - modeled after the September 11 Commission.
The Commission would examine the intelligence about Iraq, representations
made by executive branch officials about this intelligence, and whether
the Bush Administration distorted evidence about Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction.
Schakowsky
said, “President Bush is accountable for the war in Iraq and for the more
than 500 soldiers who have lost their lives. Iraq did not pose an
imminent threat to our security, yet President Bush took our nation to
a war based on false intelligence and exaggerated threats."
The
New York Times Company
January
26, 2004, Monday
THE
STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: INTELLIGENCE;
Ex-Inspector
Says C.I.A. Missed Disarray in Iraqi Arms Program
American
intelligence agencies failed to detect that Iraq's unconventional weapons
programs were in a state of disarray in recent years under the increasingly
erratic leadership of Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A.'s former chief weapons
inspector said in an interview late Saturday.
The
inspector, David A. Kay, who led the government's efforts to find evidence
of Iraq's illicit weapons programs until he resigned on Friday, said the
C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did not realize that Iraqi scientists
had presented ambitious but fanciful weapons programs to Mr. Hussein and
had then used the money for other purposes.
Dr.
Kay also reported that Iraq attempted to revive its efforts to develop
nuclear weapons in 2000 and 2001, but never got as far toward making a
bomb as Iran and Libya did.
He
said Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapon using
the poison ricin until the American invasion last March. But in general,
Dr. Kay said, the C.I.A. and other agencies failed to recognize that Iraq
had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical
or biological weapons after the first Persian Gulf war, in 1991.
From
interviews with Iraqi scientists and other sources, he said, his team learned
that sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a
"vortex of corruption," when government activities began to spin out of
control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-riven Saddam Hussein
had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from
others.
After
the onset of this "dark ages," Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized
they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons
programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was
left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed
into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of
lying and surviving in a fevered police state.
"The
whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process," Dr.
Kay said. "The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral.
Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else.
The scientists were able to fake programs."
In
interviews after he was captured, Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister,
told Dr. Kay that Mr. Hussein had become increasingly divorced from reality
during the last two years of his rule. Mr. Hussein would send Mr. Aziz
manuscripts of novels he was writing, even as the American-led coalition
was gearing up for war, Dr. Kay said.
Dr.
Kay said the fundamental errors in prewar intelligence assessments were
so grave that he would recommend that the Central Intelligence Agency and
other organizations overhaul their intelligence collection and analytical
efforts.
Dr.
Kay said analysts had come to him, "almost in tears, saying they felt so
badly that we weren't finding what they had thought we were going to find
-- I have had analysts apologizing for reaching the conclusions that they
did."
In
response to Dr. Kay's comments, an intelligence official said Sunday that
while some prewar assessments may have been wrong, "it is premature to
say that the intelligence community's judgments were completely wrong or
largely wrong -- there are still a lot of answers we need." The official
added, however, that the C.I.A. had already begun an internal review to
determine whether its analytical processes were sound.
Dr.
Kay said that based on his team's interviews with Iraqi scientists, reviews
of Iraqi documents and examinations of facilities and other materials,
the administration was also almost certainly wrong in its prewar belief
that Iraq had any significant stockpiles of illicit weapons.
"I'm
personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced
weapons of mass destruction," Dr. Kay said. "We don't find the people,
the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the
production was going on.
"I
think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the 1990's. Somewhere
in the mid-1990's, the large chemical overhang of existing stockpiles was
eliminated."
While
it is possible Iraq kept developing "test amounts" of chemical weapons
and was working on improved methods of production, he said, the evidence
is strong that "they did not produce large amounts of chemical weapons
throughout the 1990's."
Regarding
biological weapons, he said there was evidence that the Iraqis continued
research and development "right up until the end" to improve their ability
to produce ricin. "They were mostly researching better methods for weaponization,"
Dr. Kay said. "They were maintaining an infrastructure, but they didn't
have large-scale production under way."
He
added that Iraq did make an effort to restart its nuclear weapons program
in 2000 and 2001, but that the evidence suggested that the program was
rudimentary at best and would have taken years to rebuild, after being
largely abandoned in the 1990's. "There was a restart of the nuclear program,"
he said. "But the surprising thing is that if you compare it to what we
now know about Iran and Libya, the Iraqi program was never as advanced,"
Dr. Kay said.
Dr.
Kay said Iraq had also maintained an active ballistic missile program that
was receiving significant foreign assistance until the start of the American
invasion. He said it appeared that money was put back into the nuclear
weapons program to restart the effort in part because the Iraqis realized
they needed some kind of payload for their new rockets.
While
he urged that the hunt should continue in Iraq, he said he believed "85
percent of the significant things" have already been uncovered, and cautioned
that severe looting in Iraq after Mr. Hussein was toppled in April had
led to the loss of many crucial documents and other materials. That means
it will be virtually impossible to ever get a complete picture of what
Iraq was up to before the war, he added.
"There
is going to be an irreducible level of ambiguity because of all the looting,"
Dr. Kay said.
Dr.
Kay said he believed that Iraq was a danger to the world, but not the same
threat that the Bush administration publicly detailed.
"We
know that terrorists were passing through Iraq," he said. "And now we know
that there was little control over Iraq's weapons capabilities. I think
it shows that Iraq was a very dangerous place. The country had the technology,
the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through
the country -- and no central control."
C.I.A.
Missed Signs of Chaos
But
Dr. Kay said the C.I.A. missed the significance of the chaos in the leadership
and had no idea how badly that chaos had corrupted Iraq's weapons capabilities
or the threat it raised of loose scientific knowledge being handed over
to terrorists. "The system became so corrupt, and we missed that," he said.
He
said it now appeared that Iraq had abandoned the production of illicit
weapons and largely eliminated its stockpiles in the 1990's in large part
because of Baghdad's concerns about the United Nations weapons inspection
process. He said Iraqi scientists and documents show that Baghdad was far
more concerned about United Nations inspections than Washington had ever
realized.
"The
Iraqis say that they believed that Unscom was more effective, and they
didn't want to get caught," Dr. Kay said, using an acronym for the inspection
program, the United Nations Special Commission.
The
Iraqis also feared the disclosures that would come from the 1995 defection
of Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's son-in-law, who had helped run the weapons
programs. Dr. Kay said one Iraqi document that had been found showed the
extent to which the Iraqis believed that Mr. Kamel's defection would hamper
any efforts to continue weapons programs.
In
addition, Dr. Kay said, it is now clear that an American bombing campaign
against Iraq in 1998 destroyed much of the remaining infrastructure in
chemical weapons programs.
Dr.
Kay said his team had uncovered no evidence that Niger had tried to sell
uranium to Iraq for its nuclear weapons program. In his State of the Union
address in 2003, President Bush reported that British intelligence had
determined that Iraq was trying to import uranium from an African nation,
and Niger's name was later put forward.
"We
found nothing on Niger," Dr. Kay said. He added that there was evidence
that someone did approach the Iraqis claiming to be able to sell uranium
and diamonds from another African country, but apparently nothing came
of the approach. The original reports on Niger have been found to be based
on forged documents, and the Bush administration has since backed away
from its initial assertions.
Dr.
Kay added that there was now a consensus within the United States intelligence
community that mobile trailers found in Iraq and initially thought to be
laboratories for biological weapons were actually designed to produce hydrogen
for weather balloons, or perhaps to produce rocket fuel. While using the
trailers for such purposes seems bizarre, Dr. Kay said, "Iraq was doing
a lot of nonsensical things" under Mr. Hussein.
The
intelligence reports that Iraq was poised to use chemical weapons against
invading troops were false, apparently based on faulty reports and Iraqi
disinformation, Dr. Kay said.
When
American troops found that Iraqi troops had stored defensive chemical-weapons
suits and antidotes, Washington assumed the Iraqi military was poised to
use chemicals against American forces. But interviews with Iraqi military
officers and others have shown that the Iraqis kept the gear because they
feared Israel would join an American-led invasion and use chemical weapons
against them.
Role
of Republican Guards
Dr.
Kay said interviews with senior officers of the Special Republican Guards,
Mr. Hussein's most elite units, had suggested that prewar intelligence
reports were wrong in warning that these units had chemical weapons and
would use them against American forces as they closed in on Baghdad.
The
former Iraqi officers reported that no Special Republican Guard units had
chemical or biological weapons, he said. But all of the officers believed
that some other Special Republican Guard unit had chemical weapons.
"They
all said they didn't have it, but they thought other units had it," Dr.
Kay said. He said it appeared they were the victims of a disinformation
campaign orchestrated by Mr. Hussein.
Dr.
Kay said there was also no conclusive evidence that Iraq had moved any
unconventional weapons to Syria, as some Bush administration officials
have suggested. He said there had been persistent reports from Iraqis saying
they or someone they knew had see cargo being moved across the border,
but there is no proof that such movements involved weapons materials.
Dr.
Kay said the basic problem with the way the C.I.A. tried to gauge Iraq's
weapons programs is now painfully clear: for five years, the agency lacked
its own spies in Iraq who could provide credible information.
During
the 1990's, Dr. Kay said, the agency became spoiled by on-the-ground intelligence
that it obtained from United Nations weapons inspectors. But the quality
of the information plunged after the teams were withdrawn in 1998.
"Unscom
was like crack cocaine for the C.I.A.," Dr. Kay said. "They could see something
from a satellite or other technical intelligence, and then direct the inspectors
to go look at it."
The
agency became far too dependent on spy satellites, intercepted communications
and intelligence developed by foreign spies and by defectors and exiles,
Dr. Kay said. While he said the agency analysts who were monitoring Iraq's
weapons programs did the best they could with what they had, he argued
that the agency failed to make it clear to American policy makers that
their assessments were increasingly based on very limited information.
"I
think that the system should have a way for an analyst to say, 'I don't
have enough information to make a judgment,' " Dr. Kay said. "There is
really not a way to do that under the current system."
He
added that while the analysts included caveats on their reports, those
passages "tended to drop off as the reports would go up the food chain"
inside the government.
As
a result, virtually everyone in the United States intelligence community
during both the Clinton and the current Bush administrations thought Iraq
still had the illicit weapons, he said. And the government became a victim
of its own certainty.
"Alarm
bells should have gone off when everyone believes the same thing," Dr.
Kay said. "No one stood up and said, 'Let's examine the footings for these
conclusions.' I think you ought to have a place for contrarian views in
the system."
Finds
No Pressure From Bush
Dr.
Kay said he was convinced that the analysts were not pressed by the Bush
administration to make certain their prewar intelligence reports conformed
to a White House agenda on Iraq.
Last
year, some C.I.A. analysts said they had felt pressed to find links between
Iraq and Al Qaeda to suit the administration. While Dr. Kay said he has
no knowledge about that issue, he did believe that pressure was placed
on analysts regarding the weapons programs.
"All
the analysts I have talked to said they never felt pressured on W.M.D.,"
he said. "Everyone believed that they had W.M.D."
Dr.
Kay also said he never felt pressed by the Bush administration to shape
his own reports on the status of Iraq's weapons. He said that in a White
House meeting with Mr. Bush last August, the president urged him to uncover
what really happened.
"The
only comment I ever had from the president was to find the truth," Dr.
Kay said. "I never got any pressure to find a certain outcome."
Dr.
Kay, a former United Nations inspector who was brought in last summer to
run the Iraq Survey Group by George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence,
said he resigned his post largely because he disagreed with the decision
in November by the administration and the Pentagon to shift intelligence
resources from the hunt for banned weapons to counterinsurgency efforts
inside Iraq. Dr. Kay is being succeeded by Charles A. Duelfer, another
former United Nations inspector, who has also expressed skepticism about
whether the United States will find any chemical or biological weapons.
Dr.
Kay said the decision to shift resources away from the weapons hunt came
at a time of "near panic" among American officials in Baghdad because of
rising casualties caused by bombings and ambushes of American troops.
He
added that the decision ran counter to written assurances he had been given
when he took the job, and that the shift in resources had severely hampered
the weapons hunt.
He
said that there is only a limited amount of time left to conduct a thorough
search before a new Iraqi government takes over in the summer, and that
there are already signs of resistance to the work by Iraqi government officials. |