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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (123928)	1/28/2004 10:56:23 PM
From: GST	Respond to of 281500

US 'almost all wrong' about Iraq weapons Wed Jan 28, 7:10 PM ET By Salamander Davoudi and Guy Dinmore in Washington David Kay, the former chief US weapons inspector, on Wednesday told a Senate hearing that almost all the assumptions concerning Iraq (news - web sites)'s weapons capabilities had been false and that blame for the misinformation lay squarely with the intelli gence community. "We were almost all wrong and that is disturbing," said Mr Kay, who resigned last week. "Why didn't the intelligence community connect the dots prior to 9/11? It all looks very clear in retrospect." He criticised the intelligence community for allowing its eyes to be turned by technology at the expense of old-fashioned human intelligence gathering. "We have sadly underestimated our human intelligence capabilities and we have tried to do it on the cheap," he said. Mr Kay said he resigned because many of the resources needed to carry out his task were taken away from him last autumn, even after George Tenet, Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) director, agreed to his conditions of work. "I was in the process of running battles, both with the Department of Defence and the intelligence community. They wanted to redirect resources and activities of the Iraq Survey Group to the looming political insecurity crisis that was Baghdad," he said. He also reiterated remarks made in interviews since quitting that he had found no evidence of large or small stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. He added that Unscom - the United Nations (news - web sites) Special Commission - had to some extent acted as a deterrent. He denied suggestions that analysts felt pressured by the administration to massage intelligence in order to bolster the case for war. He noted that the French and German intelligence services also believed Mr Hussein had WMD. But despite his assertion that the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, he robustly defended the administration's decision to go to war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s intentions to procure prohibited weapons represented "a grave and gathering threat". "We have discovered hundreds of cases of activities that were prohibited under the initial UN resolution 687," he said. Speaking before the Senate armed services committee, Mr Kay rejected claims made by Vice-President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) that two trailers found by the US were "conclusive evidence" of a biological weapons programme. He also rejected repeated claims by senior officials that aluminium tubes sought by Iraq were intended for centrifuges to enrich uranium. But Edward Kennedy, a Democratic senator, took issue with this, quoting one former senior intelligence analyst as saying the Bush administration did lean on them. "It was not a failure of intelligence but a manipulation of intelligence to justify going to war," Mr Kennedy said. Carl Levin, the ranking Democrat on the committee, used the occasion to press for an independent inquiry, which the administration has rejected. He also suggested Mr Kay check the validity of a statement he made in the New York Times that the Clinton administration had also asserted that Iraq had illicit weapons. Since his revelations, the Bush administration has backed away from its pre- and postwar assertions that Iraq had stockpiles of prohibited weapons, while insisting the war was justified. Mr Kay noted that while the threat from Iraq was overestimated, the opposite was the case with Libya and Iran, whose WMD programmes were now thought to be more advanced than previously thought. story.news.yahoo.com