James Risen With David Kay On Saddam's WMDs

James Risen of the NY Times interviews with the C.I.A.`s former chief weapons inspector David Kay. Snippets:

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.

...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."

Another tribute to the virtues of a free market. We had seen theories that Saddam's scientists were lying about their prgress because they were afraid to tell him the truth about their lack of progress. Now we are told that some of them lied deliberately, so that he would show them the money. Bold.

He said Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin until the American invasion last March.

That will be scored as a "program".

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."

...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 not 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."

Emphasis added to an unfortunate typo - in my humble Dead Tree edition, they drop the "not". And clearly, this contradicts the heated screams of politicized intelligence emanating elsewhere.

So where are the unaccounted-for weapons?

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.

Go, Bill! I am sure the CalPundit made this guess a while back, but I can't find a link to prove it.

Was there any point to this war?

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."

MORE: James Risen follows up:

White House Shows Less Certainty Now on Iraq's Arms

MORE: The WaPo presents The Fog of WMD by Peter Feaver, a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University.

Comments

[Paul A. Miller]

Can we all agree it's past time for Bush to fire George Tenet? The intelligence failures of 9/11 were terrible; the intelligence failures in Iraq were of a different scope, but caused by the same shoddy strategy: little or no humintel, and a failure to connect the pieces of information the CIA did manage to collect.

I don't want to wait for Tenet's next mistake.

[Cecil Turner]

I'm not a Tenet fan, but this seems a bit harsh. The CIA screwed up 9/11 . . . but not as bad as the FBI did. Besides, the hijackers spent months inside the US, and were clearly the FBI's bailiwick.

Iraq intel analysis wasn't good, and clearly looks to be wrong on the stockpile issue. But they appear to have gotten the central question (the presence of WMD programs) correct. And I think the "just in time" theory (a conscious decision by Saddam to maintain a capability and resume production when it was safe to do so) makes more sense than a calculated skimming scheme that would certainly have led, if discovered, to grotesque deaths for the perpetrtors and their families.

[narciso]

Tenet, gets a bad rap. Realistically, who was going to replace him. Woolsey, would have been
great, but imagine what the Iraq-Halliburton
neocon delusionists (that's you Swopa, Jade
Gold & A Parker) would have done with that.
Rudman, Guiliani, Keating, would have been
interesting. The ideal would be someone with actual Middle East field experience, Devine,
Bearden, Andersen, et al. However, if you think
Senate nonconfirmation hearings of judges are
bad, imagine the witchhunt they would have put
for Tenet's replacement

[IceCold]

Lack of humint in Iraq (or in other "hard" target authoritarian regimes) was not a "strategy," but an understandable limitation confronting us in every closed society.

The public and diplomatic mechanics of confronting Iraq have confused many people, who think that the existence of WMD stockpiles was the main or only justification -- legally or strategically -- for regime change. It was not.

Iraq under Saddam was an intolerable mid/long-term menace in the post-9/11 context, and as such was pre-emptively eliminated. Legally and substantively, the burden was entirely on Iraq to comply with mandatory Chapter 6 UNSC resolutions, not on the CIA to prove their non-compliance. The instantaneous erroneous inversion of this reality by the media and some UNSC members was never corrected by the administration, but is indefensible nonetheless.

The reasons that pre-emption was prudent have nothing to do with detailed intelligence analysis about some particular aspect of Iraq's WMD stockpiles or programs as of March 2003. Iraq had the demonstrated capacity and will to produce and use unconventional weapons technologies, decades of deep involvement in international terrorism, and a record of reckless behavior unmatched by any government since WWII. And it was vulnerable.

Notwithstanding all this, of course we all want our intel assessments to be perfect and even clairvoyant. And the intel community is distressed by any gaps between estimates and confirmed reality. But there's a breezy perfectionism pervading this discussion that's either illiterate or disingenuous.

We're not talking here about the CIA mis-identifying Uruguay as a potential WMD proliferator or terror sponsor, after all. We're talking about divining the reality in a closed totalitarian society that was clearly a bitter enemy in every respect.

I question whether "failure" is even an appropriate term for the inability to successfully penetrate the opacity and deception of Saddams' Iraq. If -- as David Kay has suggested is one possibility -- Saddam and his top henchmen themselves were being deceived about the status of WMD programs, how reasonable is it to expect that people sitting in Langley will figure out the underlying truth?

So long as the US is aggressive and its threats (not its intel) credible, the burden of so-called intelligence "failures" falls on our adversaries -- where it belongs. While review, correction (and yes, possibly firings or resignations) are proper in the intel community, the US interest remains in keeping maximum pressure on our adversaries.

[AST]

I'm not very convinced by Kay's scenario. I suppose that Saddam's scientists could have reached the point of existential angst where they were willing to gamble their own and their families' lives for money. I suppose that they might do the bidding of a general who was scamming Saddam, but I would think the image of themselves being slowly lowered into one of his plastic shredders would exert some restraint on them.

I'm wondering if we'll ever know the real truth about what was going on in Iraq. Everybody there seems to have lost the ability to recognize truth from the lie required at the moment. Kay hasn't found any WMD, but he has come back with a good story. Maybe he's turning Iraqi.

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