According to the president, David Kay’s opinion is a matter of significant importance.
“In 2002, the United Nations Security Council yet again demanded a full accounting of Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs. As he had for over a decade, Saddam Hussein refused to comply. In fact, according to former weapons inspector David Kay, Iraq’s weapons programs were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
That’s interesting, because Kay really doesn’t think highly of the Bush administration.
A former Bush administration official who led the fruitless postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq told Congress on Wednesday that the National Security Council led by Condoleezza Rice had botched intelligence information before the war and was “the dog that did not bark” over Iraq’s weapons program.
In uncharacteristically caustic remarks about his former colleagues, the weapons inspector, David Kay, said the National Security Council had failed to protect President Bush from faulty prewar intelligence and had left Secretary of State Colin L. Powell “hanging out in the wind” when he tried to gather intelligence before the war about Iraq’s weapons programs.
Kay didn’t hold back when it came to describing Rice’s efforts.
“Where was the N.S.C?” Dr. Kay asked, suggesting that the president had come to depend too heavily on information supplied by Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, and that the president needed to reach out to others for national security information.
“Every president who has been successful, at least that I know of, in the history of this republic, has developed both informal and formal means of getting checks on whether people who tell him things are in fact telling him the whole truth,” Dr. Kay told the Senate intelligence committee at a hearing called to discuss the findings of the Sept. 11 commission.
“I think this is particularly crucial and difficult to do in the intelligence area,” he continued. “The recent history has been a reliance on the N.S.C. system to do it. I quite frankly think that has not served this president very well.”
Dr. Kay added: “The dog that did not bark in the case of Iraq’s W.M.D. weapons program, quite frankly, in my view, is the National Security Council.”
This, of course, comes just a month after Kay, the man Bush hand-picked to look for WMD in Iraq, said the president was wrong to launch an invasion last year.
President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain should have realized before going to war that intelligence on Iraqi weapons was weak and did not indicate that Saddam Hussein posed a danger to the West, the former chief US weapons inspector in Iraq said yesterday.
David Kay resigned from the CIA in January, and his conclusion then that Iraq did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons caused serious problems for both Bush and Blair, undercutting their main justification for war.
Kay told Britain’s ITV network that Bush and Blair ”should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exist for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present, and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction.”
”That was not something that required a war,” he said.
Somewhere in the White House, someone is trying to figure out how to label Kay a “disgruntled former employee” like the other former administration officials — Anthony Zinni, Rand Beers, Paul O’Neill, John DiIulio, Richard Clark — who came to realize that this administration is misguided.