January 28, 2004 Wednesday
SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
KAY: Well, it's not that they don't have a weapons program -- didn't have a weapons program; I hope they don't now. It is that they had a weapons program but it was a program activity designed to allow future production at some time. And that the missile program was actually moving ahead and I continue to emphasize I think is one that we paid inadequate attention to.
I think how they got there is they got there because the U.N. inspectors did a better job. I had them tell me in '91. They told me personally, directly, "Your all behaving like we thought a U.N. inspector would behave." I took that as a compliment. I mean we were intrusive. We were aggressive in the best sense of that word.
As we kept finding things, and then the key defection, we come back to Hussein Kamil in 1995, which they feared would lay open their whole past five years of deceit and lying to the U.N. They decided to reduce the thing that they were most vulnerable to and that's large retained stocks, knowing that they could -- at some point they get rid of us, they thought, and they could restart production.
KAY: So they kept the scientists and they kept the technology, but they came to what I think is a fair conclusion: Why keep stockpiles of weapons that are vulnerable to inspectors when you've lost your delivery capability? Wait till you have your delivery capability, and then it's a relatively short order.
We have documentary evidence and testimony that Saddam and Uday and Qusay asked in both 2000 and 2001 how long it would take to restart production of mustard and of VX nerve gas.
You know, this was a key point in part of this reckoning of, "When did you think they might be following a different strategy than the estimate?" When you get senior officials asking, "How long will it take you to produce these agents?" that tells you at least to be awake to the possibility that that means they didn't have those agents....
....Senator Nelson: Your findings indicate that Iraq had only a rudimentary chemical, biological and nuclear program, and you've identified and you've said that weapons of mass destruction-related program activities. And I have to ask you, what does that mean? What are weapons of mass destruction-related program activities?
KAY: That includes, for example -- and take specific examples of the Iraqis -- a program to develop a substitute for a major precursor for VX using indigenous production capability and indigenous chemicals, so they would not have to import it.
It includes a study, for example, on a simulant for anthrax. Pre-1991 their anthrax was liquid. They had tried to freeze-dry it and get it down to a dry anthrax, which is stable and much more deadly, lethal, as we found out here. By using this simulant they actually pushed ahead about two generations the production capability.
Now, for this simulant, the same production capability that produces it is exactly the same that produces anthrax. So they, in fact, had moved ahead their anthrax capability by working on a simulant.
And so it's in those areas that you get programs.
They had looked at the lethality of various agents and classified them. That's WMD-related work.
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