Deinonychus antirrhopus

David Kay Stepping Down

Kevin Drum points us to this article that has an interview with David Kay. Kevin snips out several bits that he thinks is quite damning, but also leaves out some important parts, IMO. Kevin excerpts the following,

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."

Q. Is that from the interviews and documentation?

A. "Well the interviews, the documentation, and the physical evidence of looking at, as hard as it was because they were dealing with looted sites, but you just could not find any physical evidence that supported a larger program."

Q: Do you think they destroyed it?

A: "No, I don't think they existed."

Q. Even though in the mid-1980s people said they used it on Halabja?

A. "They had stockpiles, they fought the Iranians with it, and they certainly did use it on the Kurds. But what everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s."

But he also leaves out this part,

Q: Is it true that one of the reasons you wanted to step down was because you don't believe that anything will be found, is that true?

A: "No. No, that wasn't the reason. In fact, the reason I thought it important to complete everything is that ... by the time we get to June ... we're not going to find much after June. Once the Iraqis take complete control of the government it is just almost impossible to operate in the way that we operate. In fact it was already becoming tough. We had an important ministry that would not allow its people to be interviewed unless they had someone present. It was like the old regime.

"I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we're going to find.

"The country is such and he hid so much that you can probably spend the next decade of your life in the country, and you will find things, but I think in terms of understanding that program, we're well on the way, almost at the end, so that you can say what went wrong, what they had."

Q: What happened to the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that everyone expected to be there?

A: "I don't think they existed.

"I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War and those were a combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them. I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production, and that's what we're really talking about, is large stockpiles, not the small. Large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in the period after '95."

Q. After '95?

A. "We're really talking about from the mid-90s, when people thought they had resumed production."

So it is possible that there are large stockpiles, but we probably wont find them anytime soon if (and that is looking like a mighty big if) they existed.

While Kevin makes the typical comments about the current administration, he ignores what I consider to be a more serious implication. How come our intelligence agencies screwed up so badly...again. Clearly we had an intelligence failure on 9/11 and now it looks like there might have been one on Iraq's WMDs. People believed he had restarted his programs and there was something dangerous going on back into the Clinton Administration.

Now I know intelligence work is extremely difficult and all that, but you'd think that after several years there'd be new information that would cause people to change their views on this stuff.