Congressional Record: January 26, 2004 (Senate)
Page S224-S226
HUSSEIN'S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Mr. DASCHLE. Madam President, I wanted to say a couple of words today
with regard to an article that appeared on the front page of the New
York Times entitled ``Ex-Inspector Says C.I.A. Missed Iraqi Arms
Chaos.''
I ask unanimous consent that the article be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the New York Times, Jan. 25, 2004]
Ex-Inspector Says C.I.A. Missed Iraqi Arms Chaos
(By James Risen)
Washington, Jan. 25.--Americans intelligence agencies
failed to detect that Iraq's unconventional weapons programs
were in a state of disarray in recent years under the
increasingly erratic leadership of Saddam Hussein, the
C.I.A.'s former chief weapons inspector said in an interview
late Saturday.
The inspector, David A. Kay, who led the government's
efforts to find evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs
until he resigned on Friday, said the C.I.A. and other
intelligence agencies did not realize that Iraqi scientists
had presented ambitious but fanciful weapons programs to Mr.
Hussein and had then used the money for other purposes.
Dr. Kay also reported that Iraq attempted to revive its
efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2000 and 2001, but
never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya did.
He said Baghdad was actively working to produce a
biological weapon using the poison ricin until the American
invasion last March. But in general, Dr. Kay said, the C.I.A.
and other agencies failed to recognize that Iraq had all but
abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical
or biological weapons after the first Persian Gulf war, in
1991.
From interviews with Iraqi scientists and other sources, he
said, his team learned that sometime around 1997 and 1998,
Iraq plunged into what he called a ``vortex of corruption,''
when government activities began to spin out of control
because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-riven Saddam
Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects
without input from others.
After the onset of this ``dark ages,'' Dr. Kay said, Iraqi
scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and
present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive
approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an
effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed
into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in
the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.
``The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a
corrupted process,'' Dr. Kay said. ``The regime was no longer
in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-
directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The
scientists were able to fake programs.''
In interviews after he was captured. Tariq Aziz, the former
deputy prime minister, told Dr. Kay that Mr. Hussein had
become increasingly divorced from reality during the last two
years of his rule. Mr. Hussein would send Mr. Aziz
manuscripts of novels he was writing, even as the American-
led coalition was gearing up for war, Dr. Kay said.
Dr. Kay said the fundamental errors in prewar intelligence
assessments were so grave that he would recommend that the
Central Intelligence Agency and other organizations overhaul
their intelligence collection and analytical efforts.
Dr. Kay said analysts had come to him, ``almost in tears,
saying they felt so badly that we weren't finding what they
had thought we were going to find--I have had analysts
apologizing for reaching the conclusions that they did.''
In response to Dr. Kay's comments, an intelligence official
said Sunday that while some prewar assessments may have been
wrong, ``it is premature to say that the intelligence
community's judgments were completely wrong or largely
wrong--there are still a lot of answers we need.'' The
official added, however, that the C.I.A. had already begun an
internal review to determine whether its analytical processes
were sound.
Dr. Kay said that based on his team's interviews with Iraqi
scientists, reviews of Iraqi documents and examinations of
facilities and other materials, the administration was also
almost certainly wrong in its prewar belief that Iraq had any
significant stockpiles of illicit weapons.
``I'm personally convinced that there were not large
stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction,''
Dr. Kay said. ``We don't find the people, the documents or
the physical plants that you would expect to find if the
production was going on.
``I think they gradually reduced stockpiles throughout the
1990's. Somewhere in the mid-1990's, the large chemical
overhang of existing stockpiles was eliminated.''
While it is possible Iraq kept developing ``test amounts''
of chemical weapons and was working on improved methods of
production, he said, the evidence is strong that ``they did
not produce large amounts of chemical weapons throughout the
1990's.''
Regarding biological weapons, he said there was evidence
that the Iraqis continued research and development ``right up
until the end'' to improve their ability to produce ricin.
``They were mostly researching better methods for
weaponization,'' Dr. Kay said. ``They were maintaining an
infrastructure, but they didn't have large-scale production
under way.''
He added that Iraq did make an effort to restart its
nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001, but that the
evidence suggested that the program was rudimentary at best
and would have taken years to rebuild, after being largely
abandoned in the 1990's. ``There was a restart of the nuclear
program,'' he said. ``But the surprising thing is that if you
compare it to what we now know about Iran and Libya, the
Iraqi program was never as advanced,'' Dr. Kay said.
Dr. Kay said Iraq had also maintained an active ballistic
missile program that was receiving significant foreign
assistance until the start of the American invasion. He said
it appeared that money was put back into the nuclear weapons
program to restart the effort in part because the Iraqi
realized they needed some kind of payload for their new
rockets.
While he urged that the hunt should continue in Iraq, he
said continue in Iraq, he said he believed ``85 percent of
the significant things'' have already been uncovered, and
cautioned that severe looting in Iraq after Mr. Hussein was
toppled in April had led to the loss of many crucial
documents and other materials. That means it will be
virtually impossible to ever get a complete picture of what
Iraq was up to before the war, he added.
``There is going to be an irreducible level of ambiguity
because of all the looting,'' Dr. Kay said.
Dr. Kay said he believed that Iraq was a danger to the
world, but not the same threat that the Bush administration
detailed.
``We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq,'' he
said. ``And now we know that there was little control over
Iraq's weapons capabilities. I think it shows that Iraq was a
very dangerous place. The country had the technology, the
ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing
through the country--and no central control.''
But Dr. Kay said the C.I.A. missed the significance of the
chaos in the leadership and had no idea how badly that chaos
had corrupted Iraq's weapons capabilities or the threat it
raised of loose scientific knowledge being handed over to
terrorists. ``The system became so corrupt, and we missed
that,'' he said.
C.I.A. Missed Signs of Chaos
He said it now appeared that Iraq had abandoned the
production of illicit weapons and largely eliminated its
stockpiles in the 1990's in large part because of Baghdad's
concerns about the United Nations weapons inspection process.
He said Iraqi scientists and documents show that Baghdad was
far more concerned about United Nations inspections than
Washington had ever realized.
``The Iraqis say that they believed that Unscom was more
effective, and they didn't want to get caught,'' Dr. Kay
said, using an acronym for the inspection program, the United
Nations Special Commission.
The Iraquis also feared the disclosures that would come
from the 1995 defection of Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's son-
in-law, who had helped run the weapons programs. Dr. Kay said
one Iraqi document that had been found showed the extent to
which the Iraqis believed that Mr. Kamel's defection would
hamper any efforts to continue weapons programs.
In addition, Dr. Kay said, it is now clear that an American
bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998 destroyed much of the
remaining infrastructure in chemical weapons programs.
Dr. Kay said his team had uncovered no evidence that Niger
had tried to sell uranium to Iraq for its nuclear weapons
program. In his State of the Union address in 2003, President
Bush reported that British intelligence had determined that
Iraq was trying to import uranium from an African nation, and
Niger's name was later put forward.
``We found nothing on Niger,'' Dr. Kay said. He added that
there was evidence that someone did approach the Iraqis
claiming to be able to sell uranium and diamonds from another
African country, but apparently nothing came of the approach.
The original reports on Niger have been found to be based on
forged documents, and the Bush administration has since
backed away from its initial assertions.
Dr. Kay added that there was now a consensus within the
United States intelligence community that mobile trailers
found in Iraq and initially thought to be laboratories for
biological weapons were actually designed to produce hydrogen
for weather balloons, or perhaps to produce rocket fuel.
While using the trailers for such purposes seems bizarre, Dr.
Kay said, ``Iraq was doing a lot of nonsensical things''
under Mr. Hussein.
[[Page S225]]
The intelligence reports that Iraq was poised to use
chemical weapons against invading troops were false,
apparently based on faulty reports and Iraqi disinformation,
Dr. Kay said.
When American troops found that Iraqi troops had stored
defensive chemical-weapons suits and antidotes, Washington
assumed the Iraq military was poised to use chemicals against
American forces. But interviews with Iraqi military officers
and others have shown that the Iraqis kept the gear because
they feared Israel would join an American-led invasion and
use chemical weapons against them.
Role of Republican Guards
Dr. Kay said interviews with senior officers of the Special
Republican Guards, Mr. Hussein's most elite units, had
suggested that prewar intelligence reports were wrong in
warning that these units had chemical weapons and would use
them against American forces as they closed in on Baghdad.
The former Iraqi officers reported that no Special
Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons, he
said. But all of the officers believed that some other
Special Republican Guard unit had chemical weapons.
``They all said they didn't have it, but they thought other
units had it,'' Dr. Kay said. He said it appeared they were
the victims of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by Mr.
Hussein.
Dr. Kay said there was also no conclusive evidence that
Iraq had moved any unconventional weapons to Syria, as some
Bush administration officials have suggested. He said there
had been persistent reports from Iraqis saying they or
someone they knew had see cargo being moved across the
border, but there is no proof that such movements involved
weapons materials.
Dr. Kay said the basic problem with the way the C.I.A.
tried to gauge Iraq's weapons programs is now painfully
clear: for five years, the agency lacked its own spies in
Iraq who could provide credible information.
During the 1990's, Dr. Kay said, the agency became spoiled
by on-the-ground intelligence that it obtained from United
Nations weapons inspectors. But the quality of the
information plunged after the teams were withdrawn in 1998.
``Unscom was like crack cocaine for the C.I.A.,'' Dr. Kay
said. ``They could see something from a satellite or other
technical intelligence, and then direct the inspectors to go
look at it.''
The agency became far too dependent on spy satellites,
intercepted communications and intelligence developed by
foreign spies and by defectors and exiles, Dr. Kay said.
While he said the agency analysts who were monitoring Iraq's
weapons programs did the best they could with what they had,
he argued that the agency failed to make it clear to American
policy makers that their assessments were increasingly based
on very limited information.
``I think that the system should have a way for an analyst
to say, `I don't have enough information to make a judgment,'
'' Dr. Kay said. ``There is really not a way to do that under
the current system.''
He added that while the analysts included caveats on their
reports, those passages ``tended to drop off as the reports
would go up the food chain'' inside the government.
As a result, virtually everyone in the United States
intelligence community during both the Clinton and the
current Bush administrations thought Iraq still had the
illicit weapons, he said. And the government became a victim
of its own certainty.
``Alarm bells should have gone off when everyone believes
the same thing,'' Dr. Kay said. ``No one stood up and said,
`Let's examine the footings for these conclusions.' I think
you ought to have a place for contrarian views in the
system.''
finds no pressure from bush
Dr. Kay said he was convinced that the analysts were not
pressed by the Bush administration to make certain their
prewar intelligence reports conformed to a White House agenda
on Iraq.
Last year, some C.I.A. analysts said they had felt pressed
to find links between Iraq and Al Qaeda to suit the
administration. While Dr. Kay said he has no knowledge about
that issue, he did believe that pressure was placed on
analysts regarding the weapons programs.
``All the analysts I have talked to said they never felt
pressured on W.M.D,'' he said. ``Everyone believed that they
had W.M.D.''
Dr. Kay also said he never felt pressed by the Bush
administration to shape his own reports on the status of
Iraq's weapons. He said that in a White House meeting with
Mr. Bush last August, the president urged him to uncover what
really happened.
``The only comment I ever had from the president was to
find the truth,'' Dr. Kay said. ``I never got any pressure to
find a certain outcome.''
Dr. Kay, a former United Nations inspector who was brought
in last summer to run the Iraq Survey Group by George J.
Tenet, the director of central intelligence, said he resigned
his post largely because he disagreed with the decision in
November by the administration and the Pentagon to shift
intelligence resources from the hunt for banned weapons to
counterinsurgency efforts inside Iraq. Dr. Kay is being
succeeded by Charles A. Duelfer, another former United
Nations inspector, who has also expressed skepticism about
whether the United States will find any chemical or
biological weapons.
Dr. Kay said the decision to shift resources away from the
weapons hunt came at a time of ``near panic'' among American
officials in Baghdad because of rising casualties caused by
bombings and ambushes of American troops.
He added that the decision ran counter to written
assurances he had been given when he took the job, and that
the shift in resources had severely hampered the weapons
hunt.
He said that there is only a limited amount of time left to
conduct a thorough search before a new Iraqi government takes
over in the summer, and that there are already signs of
resistance to the work by Iraqi government officials.
Mr. DASCHLE. The article begins with a paragraph that reads:
American intelligence agencies failed to detect that Iraq's
unconventional weapons programs were in a state of disarray
in recent years under the increasingly erratic leadership of
Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A.'s former chief weapons inspector
said in an interview late Saturday.
Mr. Kay, the head of our government's effort to determine precisely
which weapons Saddam possessed prior to the start of the war, offered
the view on whether Saddam actually had weapons of mass destruction.
His quote:
I don't think they exist. The fact that we found so far the
weapons do not exist--we've got to deal with that difference
and understand why.
I also think it is important for us to understand why. On Saturday,
Secretary of State Colin Powell held out the possibility that prewar
Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction. That is quite an
admission, given the Secretary's presentation to the United Nations,
given his assertions publicly and privately to us and many others as
the case for war in Iraq was made last spring.
These views are consistent with a report issued earlier this month by
the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment. The report by the Carnegie
Endowment concluded that the assertion that the fundamental
justification for the war with Iraq, namely that Iraq possessed
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, was not real. Carnegie also
concluded:
Administration officials systematically misrepresented the
threat from Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons
programs and ballistic missile programs.
Given the conclusion by the Carnegie Endowment, we can only get to
the bottom of this issue by thoroughly examining the performance of
both the intelligence community and senior administration officials.
This has been quite a remarkable turnaround from the debate we had 4
or 5 months ago. During that debate, many of us proposed an independent
commission to look at these issues. At that point, there was a debate
about whether or not we had all the facts and whether or not the
Intelligence Committee in the Senate was prepared to ascertain what the
facts were.
But consider now the revelations that have occurred just in the last
few days, much less the last several months. You have the Secretary of
State reversing his public position with regard to weapons of mass
destruction. You have the chief weapons investigator working for this
Government publicly declaring that weapons do not exist and questioning
whether they did exist at any time in recent years. You have the
Carnegie Endowment, one of the most respected nonpartisan organizations
that also reviewed the matter, coming to to a similar conclusion.
The question comes now: What do we do about it? We can ignore it. We
can hope it will just go away. Or we can investigate it, research it,
try to learn from it to ensure that mistakes of this consequence won't
happen again in the future. Unfortunately, it appears neither the
administration nor the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
share this view.
According to Dr. Kay, he is stepping down in large part because the
administration has reduced his team of analysts, translators, and
interrogators working on the search for Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction.
I cannot overstate the significance of these claims. They contributed
directly to the decision to go to war last spring. As many of us have
said on several occasions, this obviously wasn't the only motivation,
but it was clearly a major part of this decision for many of us.
Since we made that fateful decision, over 500 Americans have been
killed, over 2,000 have been wounded, and over
[[Page S226]]
100,000 are still deployed in harm's way. In addition, published
reports indicate the lack of evidence has badly damaged America's
credibility around the world.
So given all of this, I cannot understand why we would not want to
get to the bottom of this issue as quickly as possible. We should be
dedicating more resources to getting these answers not less.
I am troubled too by the position of the chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee. This committee has the obligation and the
authority to examine both the intelligence community and the
administration's role in the intelligence failures leading up to the
war with Iraq.
Yet throughout all of the last session of Congress, the chairman
steadfastly refused to permit the committee to meet its
responsibilities. We are at the start of a new session of Congress now,
with the advantage of a lot more information than we had weeks or
months ago.
In the wake of the statements by Secretary Powell and Dr. Kay, and
the conclusions of the nonpartisan Carnegie Endowment, I urge the
chairman of the Intelligence Committee to reconsider his position and
that of the majority.
We will work within the Intelligence Committee to urge the chairman
to live up to those obligations. If he continues to fail to do so, we
will again bring legislation to the Senate floor to establish a
nonpartisan, independent commission to look at how intelligence was
used by the intelligence community and this administration.
Our troops in Iraq and the American people deserve a full and
comprehensive review of all aspects of their Government's actions prior
to the start of the Iraqi war. I hope all members of the Intelligence
Committee, and indeed the entire Senate, will work with us to give them
just that.
Madam President, we will continue to come to the floor to review
these matters and to express in the most determined way that it is the
responsibility of this Senate to live up to its obligations--the
Intelligence Committee, the other committees of jurisdiction, and the
broad membership--especially when we become aware of revelations and
conclusions drawn by experts in the field. We simply cannot afford to
ignore what happened, why it happened, and how we can prevent it from
happening again.
I yield the floor.
____________________
