David Kay has now given a more detailed interview to National Public Radio after leaving the Iraq Survey Group. It's helpful and at least more complete than his sketchy comments to Reuters and The Telegraph earlier this weekend.
The former top U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq said Sunday he believes Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. David Kay said the challenge for the United States now is to figure out why intelligence indicated that the Iraqi president did have them.Posted by Alan at January 25, 2004 11:38 AM"We led this search to find the truth, not to find the weapons. The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist, we've got to deal with that difference and understand why," Kay said Sunday on the National Public Radio program "Weekend Edition."
Asked whether he feels President Bush owes the American people an apology for starting the war on the basis of apparently flawed intelligence, Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people.
"You have to remember that this view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change in the Bush administration. It is not a political 'got you' issue. It is a serious issue of how you could come to the conclusion that is not matched by the future."
"It's not a political issue. Its an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."
Since Kay's resignation Friday as the top U.S. weapons investigator in Iraq, Kay has said Iraq had no large-scale weapons production program during the 1990s, after it lost the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and no large numbers of mass destruction weapons were available for "imminent action."
Still, "that is not the same thing as saying it was not a serious, imminent threat," he said Sunday. "That is a political judgment," he said, "not a technical judgment."
Kay said he believes the American public and politicians now have to grapple with the question of whether the Iraqi dictator posed an imminent threat. Given the reality on the ground, as opposed to estimates, some may reach different conclusions than they did before the war, he said.
"I must say I actually think Iraq — what we learned during the inspections — made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war," Kay added.
Article via Yahoo! News
Interview available at NPR