A rchive Date
[ 29-01-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4049012/
Rice rejects outside probe of Iraq data
Security adviser responds to Kay testimony on WMD
MSNBC staff and news service reports
WASHINGTON - President Bush’s national security adviser on Thursday rejected calls for an independent investigation of apparently faulty intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program, noting the CIA is conducting its own intelligence review and the hunt for the illegal arms has not ended.
Taking issue with former weapons inspector David Kay, Condoleezza Rice said current efforts to assess the data-gathering operation are sufficient.
“No one will want to know more than the president the comparison between what we found when we got there and what we thought was there going in,” Rice said on NBC’s “Today” show.
Asked if she thought the American people have a legitimate concern about whether intelligence was manipulated to justify the decision to go to war, Rice replied, “The president’s judgment to go to the war was based on the fact that Saddam Hussein for 12 years had defied U.N. resolutions” regarding his stock of weapons.
‘It was time to take care of that danger’
The administration also went to war, she said, “because this was a dangerous man in the world’s most dangerous region. He had been considered a danger for a long time and it was time to take care of that danger.”
Interviewed on CBS’s “The Early Show,” Rice said America wasn’t alone in believing Saddam had such weapons.
“It was the judgment of our intelligence community, the judgment of intelligence communities around the world,” she said. “It was the judgment of many intelligence officials in countries that didn’t even support the war that he had weapons of mass destruction. ... Everybody thought that he did.”
During testimony Wednesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kay said he believed an outside inquiry would be important to see why intelligence failed and how it could be improved.
That drew a stern rebuke from the panel’s chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who said, “I personally take some umbrage at people who for one reason or another think we need to have an outside investigation before our inquiry is even complete.”
Kay’s testimony provided fresh ammunition for Republicans and Democrats alike.
Under questioning by Senate Democrats, he acknowledged that he found no evidence that Iraq had chemical or biological stockpiles – even small ones. He offered doubts about Bush administration claims that trailers and aluminum tubes were intended for weapons of mass destruction. He said U.N. inspections, belittled by the administration, “achieved quite a bit.”
But Kay agreed with Republican senators that there is no doubt Saddam had ambitions to use such weapons — that in fact he had used such weapons in the past. Kay said Saddam had secret weapons development programs that violated U.N. resolutions, and that the world is much safer without his government in place.
“I have said I actually think this may be one of those cases where it was even more dangerous than we thought,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Resigned over reduced resources
Kay, a former chief U.N. nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq, resigned Friday from his position as the CIA’s special adviser for the weapons search, citing a decision to reduce resources for the search.
At the hearing and in recent interviews, Kay said he found no evidence that Saddam possessed the banned weapons in recent years. Bush’s public rationale for going to war was based mostly on claims that Iraq’s stockpile of weapons posed a clear threat to the United States and others.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s inquiry is nearing completion. But the committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said in a statement Wednesday that Kay’s testimony shows a need to expand that review. Rockefeller said the inquiry should examine whether the administration manipulated intelligence.
At the hearing, Kay said he does not think analysts were pressured to shape evidence to make the case for war. “I deeply think that is the wrong explanation,” Kay said.
“You know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that,” he said.
Kay described a broad intelligence failure on Iraq. “We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” he said.
Lack of human spies faulted
He blamed a lack of human spying inside Iraq and inadequate money for U.S. intelligence agencies. He also said he believes analysts have been asked to read too much into limited data and depended too much on data provided by U.N. inspectors.
Kay said his team wrestled with the question of why Saddam did not try to save himself by proving he no longer had stockpiles of banned weapons. Kay said Saddam likely did not want to appear to be caving in to the United States and the United Nations. He also wanted to use the threat of chemical weapons as leverage against his domestic enemies.
Questioned by Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Kay said the fear of U.N. weapons inspectors had contributed to Iraqi decisions to stop making banned weapons. But when Clinton suggested that inspections should have been given more time, Kay said Iraqis have been more forthcoming now than under Saddam.
“I think we have learned things that no U.N. inspector would have ever learned given the terror regime of Saddam and the tremendous personal consequences that scientists had to run by speaking the truth,” he said.
Kay agreed with Sen. John Warner, R-Va., that because Iraq is so large, there’s a “theoretical possibility” that banned weapons could still turn up somewhere. But he expressed reservations when Warner said, “Maybe we’d better not pronounce, ‘We’re all wrong,’ yet.”
“I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons there,” Kay said.
© 2004 MSNBC Interactive
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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