This Inspector’s Broken… Can We Have Another?
The man leading the US hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has quit amid a lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had illegal stockpiles of arms … David Kay gave no reason for leaving but sources in Washington speak of a mixture of personal reasons and his disillusionment with the search. He did say he believed Iraq had not had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons during the 1990s.
Q: What happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone expected to be there?
A: “I don’t think they existed …
Q: You came away from the hunt that you have done believing that they did not have any large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the country?
A: “That is correct.”
It seems that the Kay timed his resignation until after King Bush’s State of the Empire speech – so that Bush could refer to Kay’s earlier interim report to Congress. Compare and contrast:
We are seeking all the facts — already the Kay report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. There were no active WMD programs. There were no mobile weapons labs. There was no nuclear program, or any efforts to obtain the technology to start one–even after UN inspectors were withdrawn in 1998. “On any given day,” Saddam Hussein could not have threatened the United States or neighboring countries, nor passed any WMD material to any terrorist group anywhere in the world. These are … the sober conclusions of David Kay’s official $300 million investigation.
Anyway, to replace Kay – a former true believer who went to Iraq convinced that WMDs lay buried in every garden and under every outhouse — the CIA is sending a former UN weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer. He professes to have “an open mind”:
David Albright, a former weapons inspector, said Duelfer had gained respect for his work at the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq. He said there was a perception that Kay was more of an ideologue, convinced the weapons existed.
Here’s what Charles Duelfer had to say in September 25, 2002:
The most striking intelligence is the statement that the Iraqi military has the capability to deploy and use chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes of receiving an order. Until Unscom left Iraq in 1998, we strongly suspected that the regime had the ability to launch a chemical or biological attack. This evidence suggests to me that concrete intelligence has now been obtained … On his nuclear weapons development, the dossier points to Saddams attempts to obtain uranium from Africa; and procurement attempts for enrichment-related equipment, specifically the key elements for uranium centrifugal-enrichment technology.
This guy seemed willing to take at face value the two most outrageously false assertions of the Blair Regime. I can see why they gave him the job.