"C.I.A. Missed Signs of Chaos," reports former chief Iraq weapons inspector David Kay, in the New York Times. Apparently, Kay believes the Iraqi weapons program became so corrupted after the Gulf War, that Iraqi scientists sold Saddam on bogus programs that fattened their budgets but produced little. "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 But the quality of the information plunged after the teams were withdrawn in 1998...The agency became far too dependent on spy satellites, intercepted communications and intelligence developed by foreign spies and by defectors and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."

Kay's research shows that Iraq's chemical weapons program was apparently abandoned almost entirely sometime in the early 1990s, and the biological program was reduced to research on ricin. Its nuclear program was far less developed than Iran's and Libya's.

"'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'...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.'"

What's striking -beyond Kay's conclusions at how much the collective US intelligence community and its Congressional overseers and White House customers overwhelmingly failed at their job -- is how much Kay's team's research showed that Iraq under Saddam Hussein was far more chaotic, corrupt and lacking in strong central control than one would have thought from reports on Saddam's paranoiac rule.

One wonders, when might Congress hold public hearings on the staggering intelligence failure that led, frankly, not just the Bush White House but the Clinton administration before it, and major powers around the world, to wrongly believe Saddam still harbored large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction up through the 2003 war.

Perhaps more pertinent, one wonders when Kay might brief Cheney's office, and urge him to reevaluate his delusional statements based on the facts. And while he's at it, someone might leak a copy to the Weekly Standard.

[Incidentally, heard a very telling - and completely off record -- anecdote this weekend by an expert on a certain relevant region, who was asked to write a piece on a certain country by a certain magazine. When his piece came in, the editor called him, and said, she loves it, but unfortunately the powers that be at the magazine didn't want to run it -- because it didn't conform to their party line about that country -- a party line that was based not on any expert knowledge, mind you, but on essentially wishful thinking about what they would like to happen. In other words, based on delusions and ideology. And then a few weeks later, when pretty much exactly what the analyst had predicted had come to pass, the editor had emailed the writer to remark -- wow! it's eerie how accurate your analysis turned out to be! Analysis, of course, that was never published in the magazine. There's a word for an organization with that kind of mission statement, and it ain't journalism.]

Posted by Laura at January 25, 2004 05:58 PM