Post by Gorf on Jul 25, 2004 18:05:29 GMT -5
Sun Jul 18, 3:28 PM ET
By BETH GARDINER, Associated Press Writer
LONDON - President Bush (news - web sites) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) should have realized before going to war that intelligence on Iraqi weapons was weak and did not indicate Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) posed a danger to the West, America's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq (news - web sites) said Sunday.
David Kay resigned from the CIA (news - web sites) in January and his conclusion then that Iraq did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons caused serious problems for both Bush and Blair, undercutting their main justification for war.
He told Britain's ITV network that Bush and Blair "should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exist for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction."
"That was not something that required a war," he said.
He said the leaders may not have been sufficiently critical of intelligence on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
"WMD was only one and I think in their mind, not really the most important one," he said. "And so the doubts about the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was not as serious to them as it seemed to be to the rest of the world."
Kay said two recent reports on intelligence failures in Iraq showed that American and British information-gathering and analyzing systems were "broken."
"I think they are a scathing indictment," he said of the reports from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and a British commission headed by former senior civil servant Lord Butler.
Butler's report, published Wednesday, said Iraq had no stockpiles of useable chemical or biological weapons before the war and British intelligence to the contrary had been drawn in part from "seriously flawed" or "unreliable" sources.
He absolved Blair's government of deliberately distorting the evidence and did not blame any individuals for the failure. But he said the government had pushed its case to the limits of available intelligence and solidified analysts' hedged, tentative assessments of Iraqi arms into definite statements.
The U.S. report agreed that intelligence on Iraq was flawed and placed much of the blame on the CIA, which it accused of succumbing to "group think" and interpreting all evidence according to its presumption that Iraq had banned weapons.
Kay said analysts were facing pressure to support the belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
"Anything that showed Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction had a much higher gate to pass because if it were true, all of U.S. policy towards Iraq would have fallen asunder," he said in the interview.
By BETH GARDINER, Associated Press Writer
LONDON - President Bush (news - web sites) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites) should have realized before going to war that intelligence on Iraqi weapons was weak and did not indicate Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) posed a danger to the West, America's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq (news - web sites) said Sunday.
David Kay resigned from the CIA (news - web sites) in January and his conclusion then that Iraq did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons caused serious problems for both Bush and Blair, undercutting their main justification for war.
He told Britain's ITV network that Bush and Blair "should have been able to tell before the war that the evidence did not exist for drawing the conclusion that Iraq presented a clear, present and imminent threat on the basis of existing weapons of mass destruction."
"That was not something that required a war," he said.
He said the leaders may not have been sufficiently critical of intelligence on Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
"WMD was only one and I think in their mind, not really the most important one," he said. "And so the doubts about the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was not as serious to them as it seemed to be to the rest of the world."
Kay said two recent reports on intelligence failures in Iraq showed that American and British information-gathering and analyzing systems were "broken."
"I think they are a scathing indictment," he said of the reports from the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and a British commission headed by former senior civil servant Lord Butler.
Butler's report, published Wednesday, said Iraq had no stockpiles of useable chemical or biological weapons before the war and British intelligence to the contrary had been drawn in part from "seriously flawed" or "unreliable" sources.
He absolved Blair's government of deliberately distorting the evidence and did not blame any individuals for the failure. But he said the government had pushed its case to the limits of available intelligence and solidified analysts' hedged, tentative assessments of Iraqi arms into definite statements.
The U.S. report agreed that intelligence on Iraq was flawed and placed much of the blame on the CIA, which it accused of succumbing to "group think" and interpreting all evidence according to its presumption that Iraq had banned weapons.
Kay said analysts were facing pressure to support the belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
"Anything that showed Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction had a much higher gate to pass because if it were true, all of U.S. policy towards Iraq would have fallen asunder," he said in the interview.
