Oh. This is going to hurt.

Kay Says Evidence Shows Iraq Disarmed
Action Done in '90s, Ex-Inspector Notes

By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers

U.S. weapons inspectors in Iraq found new evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime quietly destroyed some stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons in the mid-1990s, former chief inspector David Kay said yesterday.

The discovery means that inspectors have not only failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but also have found exculpatory information -- contemporaneous documents and confirmations from interviews with Iraqis -- demonstrating that Saddam Hussein did make efforts to disarm well before President Bush began making the case for war.

The fact that Iraq disarmed at least partially before 1998 but did not turn over records to U.N. inspectors even when threatened with war has led Kay to conclude that Hussein was bluffing about his weapons capability to maintain an aura of power.

Kay, who will testify this morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview yesterday that inspectors recovered only partial records detailing the destruction of some of Iraq's forbidden weapons. But he said that while the full truth may not be known for years, if ever, that ambiguity should not be used to delay an examination of why the allegations about Hussein's weapons were wrong.

"If the weapons programs existed on the scale we anticipated," Kay said, "we would have found something that leads to that conclusion. Instead, we found other evidence that points to something else." Kay reiterated his view that 85 percent of the Iraq Survey Group's job has been completed and that "the major pieces of the puzzle" have been covered.

"We will be digging up smaller pieces for the next 15 years, but we should not wait for every piece and not be able to begin to reconstruct what happened," he said. Kay added that he is "afraid that ambiguity would be used as a delaying function by some people to delay trying to find out what went wrong."

Kay's revelation that Iraq had documented the destruction of its weapons is the most recent of several disclosures he has made, since his resignation Friday as special adviser to CIA Director George J. Tenet, that have put the White House on the defensive. Kay's statements have also enlivened the Democratic presidential race and caused a wave of recriminations from the CIA and on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are demanding a probe to determine whether the administration or the intelligence services are to blame for what has turned out to be false accusations about Iraq's weapons programs.

Bush, fielding numerous questions in the Oval Office based on Kay's earlier assertion that there are no weapons stockpiles in Iraq, said yesterday that it is premature to form judgments. "I think it's very important for us to let the Iraq Survey Group do its work so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what was thought."

Though he did not repeat his earlier statements that forbidden weapons may yet be found in Iraq, Bush said: "I said in the run-up that Saddam was a grave and gathering danger -- that's what I said. And I believed it then, and I know it was true now. And as Mr. Kay said, that Iraq was a dangerous place."

In a private meeting between Bush and congressional leaders, Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) told Bush it is important to determine what went wrong to produce the flawed prewar weapons charges. Democratic sources said that prompted a testy exchange between Bush and Daschle.

In his interview with The Post, as in his other interviews, Kay put the blame for the flawed weapons charges on the intelligence community, not on the Bush administration. Both the CIA and opposition Democrats -- in Congress and on the campaign trail -- took issue with that position.

Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean blamed the White House for the false accusations. "I think the biggest problem with David Kay's resignation is that the vice president evidently went to the CIA and influenced the writing of intelligence reports," he said in a radio interview. "In other words, the administration did cook the books."

Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) said: "We were told by the administration 'they [the Iraqis] have a 45-minute capacity to deploy weapons of mass destruction.' They didn't. We were told that they had aerial devices that could spread these weapons over our troops. They didn't."

Kay's criticism of the quality of prewar intelligence has angered members of the intelligence community. He called U.S. intelligence "inaccurate" Monday on NBC, adding, "We need to understand why that was."

Yesterday, Kay broadened his statement: "Everyone was wrong. Outside experts like myself and other intelligence agencies . . . including the Germans and French believed he [Hussein] had weapons."

U.S. officials criticized Kay for saying that 85 percent of the work was done. One official noted that on November 2, in criticizing a story in The Washington Post, Kay said: "We have much work left to do before any conclusions can be reached on the state of possible Iraqi nuclear weapons program efforts." Another official familiar with the work of the Iraq Survey Group said that there are millions of pages of documents still to be translated from Arabic, that detainees and scientists need to be questioned, and that the review of weapons sites is ongoing.

In the interview yesterday, Kay said the ISG had found some "contemporary documents" that proved Iraq destroyed weapons in the mid-1990s -- steps that were not reported to U.N. inspectors.

Senior Iraqi scientists interviewed by Kay admitted hiding their chemical and biological weapons programs in the early 1990s. In 1995, however, Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamal, who directed the illegal weapons programs, defected. At about that time, the scientists said they tried unsuccessfully to convince U.N. inspectors that they had destroyed their weapons and agents. They tried to "come clean, but we wouldn't believe them," Kay said.

Kay said the Iraqi scientists did not have complete records to back up their claims because the destruction had taken place under pressure to keep it secret from U.N. inspectors. In addition to documents, Kay said, ISG members interviewed people who confirmed some of the destruction, but far from all of it. "That will be impossible, and there will always be some doubts," Kay said.

Kay said he believes Hussein may have been pursuing a course of "constructive ambiguity" before the war, bluffing about having weapons to give the illusion of power and to put up a deterrent. "Saddam wanted to enjoy the benefits of having chemical and biological weapons without having to pay the costs," Kay said.

The retired chief weapons inspector said he has been somewhat surprised by the reaction to his conclusions in recent days. "I thought I was not saying anything more than the obvious," he said.

In response to the Kay revelations, White House officials and British Foreign Minister Jack Straw said yesterday that they never claimed that Hussein represented an "imminent" threat.

"I think some in the media have chosen to use the word 'imminent,' " White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. "Those were not words we used. We used 'grave and gathering threat.' "

Though Bush did not use the word "imminent," he said in a major speech in October 2002 that waiting to confront Hussein was "the riskiest of all options." The United States, he said, "must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. . . . we have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring."

More critical information about the prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons program is expected to emerge from a report to be released today in London by a senior British judge who investigated the suicide of a scientist who had leaked information about the Blair government's white paper on Iraq. The report is expected to examine the claim that Iraq could prepare to launch its chemical weapons within 45 minutes, a charge Bush had echoed. Link