No Matter How Hard The Political Spin,
David Kay’s WMD Findings Are Damning

By William Finucane

Remember sitting in front of your television a year ago and having your jaw fall slack as officials in the United States and Britain announced that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had nuclear devices he could rush out of hiding in 45 minutes? This chilled the west.

All of us were at the non-existent mercy of this monster. Think what he could do with these nuclear devices, biological agents and chemical weapons. There was no question Hussein would use these devices. He’d already unleashed killer materials on the northern Kurdish people in his country, killing them without so much as a second thought.

God, what could he do to United States soldiers invading his whole country? It was to consider the unthinkable.

That was his strongest suit; everybody knew what he was capable of inflicting on others, and it was further generally understood that Hussein had not been able to build up a huge new army since his first major defeat early in the 1990s. So it seemed obvious his big threat was weapons of mass destruction. Those were his only true aces in the (rat) hole, so to speak.

Self-assured in their knowledge that these horrible weapons were there, the United States and Great Britain launched their War of the Willing upon Iraq. But it did take some maneuvering. There was some back-stepping on the 45-minute claim. But that wasn't very detrimental, given the assertion Saddam had lots of heavy hitting weapons and they would be discovered.

United Nations folks wanted a much slower movement.

Too slow, way too slow, insisted American President George W. Bush. And if the weak kneed individuals or the generally weaker nations could not get themselves together, then Bush would surge ahead without them. He and Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz , et al, didn’t want to wait for anyone, they had their own agenda. This was particularly true of Mr. Cheney, who even some British government officials now point to as the key to why there was no delay or compromise.

So the United States lodged its first-ever preemptive war. It attacked, so it said, because the enemy had death waiting on all sides. Yet Bush and his cadre knew quite well that, all things being equal, weapons of mass destruction would be the measure of what drew this nation and its few allies into war. It was purported that Hussein could use them himself, if they weren’t taken from him, or transport them to terrorists like a Godfather delegating murder down through the ranks from Consigliore to Capo to buttonman.

But after some weeks of fighting, nobody was finding any weapons of mass destruction. Oh all of us saw things that might have been weapons, particularly when Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to point them out to the United Nations in an earlier, well publicized presentation. He showed pictures taken by satellites and planes that seemed to make the presence of mega-weapons almost a certainty.

On the ground in Iraq, though, there was nothing.

To prove that there really were nuclear, biological and chemical weapons stashed somewhere in the territory of Iraq, the American Central Intelligence Agency called in the premier expert on Iraq’s weapons: David Kay. When he saw them he would know, or when he saw their remains, he would know. Kay was there after the previous war and knew what Hussein had possessed.

Kay, the former chief nuclear weapons inspector for the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM), had the optimum resume for finding these weapons, no matter how well hidden they were. On June 11, CIA Director George Tenet announced that Kay would be based in Iraq and responsible for handling the ongoing search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The Special Adviser would get support from Department of Defense's Iraq Survey Group. Kay had all the bells, whistles and government backing a weapons searcher could hope to attain.

"David Kay's experience and background make him the ideal person for this new role," Tenet said in a CIA news release, "his understanding of the history of the Iraqi (wapons) programs and knowledge of past Iraqi efforts to hide WMD will be of inestimable help in determining the current status of Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons."

Nine months Mr. Kay then spent searching for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, making good use of 1,000 staffers to check everything that could possibly be found. What Mr. Kay and his staff found was nothing. Absolutely nothing even remotely similar to a weapon of mass destruction was found, save some component leftovers from 10 years ago, and certainly some paperwork that there had once been development of such destructive weapons in the past. But there were no mass destructive weapons.

What you and I and most members of the United States Congress had all been convinced of was that Saddam Hussein was a mad man with death at every fingertip. He was therefore not to be trifled with in the normal manner. He had to be sliced out of the Iraq picture. Immediately.

But that picture is radically different now.

Hussein has been caught and dragged from his rat hole without anything more dangerous than a pistol in his possession. Of course he is going to present his own set of problems to U.S. officials if he ever is put on the witness stand. It is quite possible he may begin railing at the United States for turning on him after keeping him in power earlier in his career. But that is a future scenario, however ironic. What Mr. Bush now must explain is how the United States got such abysmally bad intelligence from and about Iraq. If the CIA got its signals so hugely crossed, then the whole intelligence agency, maybe the system itself, needs immediate surgery.

Of course, Bush won’t say that is the problem; he and his administration will most likely just let blame fall on the spy agency and see how it defends itself. There are classified secrets to guard and all those sort of problems, so as Bush’s father was wont to say, ‘It wouldn’t be prudent’ to have all of those things thrashed about in broad daylight, really.

It might be, of course, that Bush and his associates performed a little creative interpretation of the secret intelligence data, adding some more robust flavor to the photo analysis, suppositions and assumptions that were the basic ingredients. In the end it would be something more suited to an American war pie than a bland United Nations soup filled with waiting and watching.

One of those scenarios must be true. Or, possibly, both can be true.

Either way, the nation has been led to a diet of war for no good reason. Saddam Hussein is out of power, surely. And he certainly was a despicable petty tyrant. But as a nation, we have now committed the war-lord’s sin of attacking someone because he looks like a bad fellow, even though he has done nothing to us or our allies.

We – or rather George W. Bush – just didn’t like Hussein’s manner of ruling a country, and of course his opinion was cast in stone when it apparently became clear Saddam was behind an assassination plot against his father, former president George H.W. Bush.

Truly, Hussein’s rule was horrid. Anyone in the west who knew any details disliked it. But that differs vastly from taking up arms and attacking the man and the nation. Even using the flawed logic that pre-emptive strikes are justified, there are many other despots running aggressor nations that we could have picked; leaders who were doing exactly the same as Hussein and sometimes much worse, in terms of U.S. and world security. Why choose Hussein?

It seems that the reasons involved the fact Iraq has the second biggest oil fields in the world, and because Hussein tried to kill the older Bush – President George Bush of the 1991 war on Iraq.

Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others now have their hands on an oil asset they coveted for years; and they have Hussein behind bars. They accomplished all their goals. But in the process they made America the first western country that led a preemptive attack on a weak opponent by lying about the potential terror this new enemy could inflict.

Hussein was not a terrorist. He was a secular thug.

Now, of course, terrorists are in Iraq and are fighting for radical Islamic ends because the secular thug is out of the picture. In the war against Osama bin Laden and the world’s true terrorists, all America has done is weaken itself. Iraq has cost us some 500 dead soldiers and gotten us no closer to safety. David Kay’s findings are damning.