KAY: As you know and we discussed, I do not have a written statement. This hearing came about very quickly. I do have a few preliminary comments, but I suspect you're more interested in asking questions, and I'll be happy to respond to those questions to the best of my ability.

I would like to open by saying that the talent, dedication and bravery of the staff of the [Iraq Survey Group] that was my privilege to direct is unparalleled and the country owes a great debt of gratitude to the men and women who have served over there and continue to serve doing that.

A great deal has been accomplished by the team, and I do think ... it important that it goes on and it is allowed to reach its full conclusion. In fact, I really believe it ought to be better resourced and totally focused on WMD; that that is important to do it.

But I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to ensure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.

Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.

Sen. [Edward] Kennedy knows very directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.

I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war -- certainly, the French president, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq's possession of WMD.

The Germans certainly -- the intelligence service believed that there were WMD.

It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.

We're also in a period in which we've had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go the other way. The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the Iranians admit was 18 years on, that we underestimated. And, in fact, we didn't discover it. It was discovered by a group of Iranian dissidents outside the country who pointed the international community at the location.

The Libyan program recently discovered was far more extensive than was assessed prior to that.

There's a long record here of being wrong. There's a good reason for it. There are probably multiple reasons. Certainly proliferation is a hard thing to track, particularly in countries that deny easy and free access and don't have free and open societies.

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of [U.N.] Resolution 1441.

Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities -- one last chance to come clean about what it had.

We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.

I think the aim -- and certainly the aim of what I've tried to do since leaving -- is not political and certainly not a witch hunt at individuals. It's to try to direct our attention at what I believe is a fundamental fault analysis that we must now examine.

And let me take one of the explanations most commonly given: Analysts were pressured to reach conclusions that would fit the political agenda of one or another administration. I deeply think that is a wrong explanation.

As leader of the effort of the Iraqi Survey Group, I spent most of my days not out in the field leading inspections. It's typically what you do at that level. I was trying to motivate, direct, find strategies.

In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.

And never -- not in a single case -- was the explanation, "I was pressured to do this." The explanation was very often, "The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it."

And each case was different, but the conversations were sufficiently in depth and our relationship was sufficiently frank that I'm convinced that, at least to the analysts I dealt with, I did not come across a single one that felt it had been, in the military term, "inappropriate command influence" that led them to take that position.

It was not that. It was the honest difficulty based on the intelligence that had -- the information that had been collected that led the analysts to that conclusion.

And you know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that.

We get rid of the people who, in fact, were exercising that.

The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong, and we've got to figure out what was there. And that's what I call fundamental fault analysis.

And like I say, I think we've got other cases other than Iraq. I do not think the problem of global proliferation of weapons technology of mass destruction is going to go away, and that's why I think it is an urgent issue.

And let me really wrap up here with just a brief summary of what I think we are now facing in Iraq. I regret to say that I think at the end of the work of the [Iraq Survey Group] there's still going to be an unresolvable ambiguity about what happened.

A lot of that traces to the failure on April 9 to establish immediately physical security in Iraq -- the unparalleled looting and destruction, a lot of which was directly intentional, designed by the security services to cover the tracks of the Iraq WMD program and their other programs as well, a lot of which was what we simply called Ali Baba looting. "It had been the regime's. The regime is gone. I'm going to go take the gold toilet fixtures and everything else imaginable."

I've seen looting around the world and thought I knew the best looters in the world. The Iraqis excel at that.

The result is -- document destruction -- we're really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we're going to come to. There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

But I do think the survey group -- and I think Charlie Duelfer is a great leader. I have the utmost confidence in Charles. I think you will get as full an answer as you can possibly get.

And let me just conclude by my own personal tribute, both to the president and to [CIA Director] George Tenet, for having the courage to select me to do this, and my successor, Charlie Duelfer, as well.

Both of us are known for probably at times regrettable streak of independence. I came not from within the administration, and it was clear and clear in our discussions and no one asked otherwise that I would lead this the way I thought best and I would speak the truth as we found it. I have had absolutely no pressure prior, during the course of the work at the [Iraq Survey Group], or after I left to do anything otherwise.

I think that shows a level of maturity and understanding that I think bodes well for getting to the bottom of this. But it is really up to you and your staff, on behalf of the American people, to take on that challenge. It's not something that anyone from the outside can do. So I look forward to these hearings and other hearings at how you will get to the conclusions.

I do believe we have to understand why reality turned out to be different than expectations and estimates. But you have more public service -- certainly many of you -- than I have ever had, and you recognize that this is not unusual.

I told Sen. [John] Warner [chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee] earlier that I've been drawn back as a result of recent film of reminding me of something. At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, the combined estimate was unanimity in the intelligence service that there were no Soviet warheads in Cuba at the time of the missile crisis.

Fortunately, President Kennedy and [then-Attorney General] Robert Kennedy disagreed with the estimate and chose a course of action less ambitious and aggressive than recommended by their advisers.

But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.

So that by the end of the Johnson administration, the intelligence community had a capability to do what it had not been able to do at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

I think you face a similar responsibility in ensuring that the community is able to do a better job in the future than it has done in the past.

President Bush Meets With Polish President
CNN LIVE TODAY -- January 27, 2004

BUSH: Well, I think the Iraqi Survey Group must do its work. And, again, I appreciate David Kay's contribution.

I said in the run-up to the war against Iraq that, first of all, hopefully the international community would take care of him. I was hoping the United Nations would enforce its resolutions -- one of many.

And then we went to the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution, 1441, unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, "You must disclose and destroy your weapons programs," which obviously meant the world felt he had such programs. He chose defiance -- it was his choice to make -- and he did not let us in.

USA names new WMD adviser
The Times of India -- January 24, 2004

WASHINGTON: US has named a new inspector for the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction after its veteran investigator expressed sceptism that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed the arms.

CIA Director George Tenet has named Charles Duelfer to succeed David Kay to lead the search for WMDs in Iraq . Kay resigned from his position saying there was no evidence to prove that Iraq had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons after the 1991 war.

"I don't think they (WMDs) existed," Kay told a reporter. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production programme in the nineties," he said.

The CIA announced that Duelfer, who has previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found, would succeed Kay as Washington 's chief arms hunter for the coalition.

Kay said he left the post due to a "complex set of issues. It related in part to a reduction in the resource and a change in focus of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG)," which is in charge of the weapons hunt which many have already begun to say is a wild goose chase.

ISG analysts have been diverted from hunting for weapons of mass destruction to helping in the fight against the insurgency, Kay said.

"When I had started out I had made it a condition that ISG be exclusively focused on WMD, that's no longer so," he said.

Ex-arms hunter says Iraq had no WMD
Reuters via The Telegraph (Calcutta) -- 24 January, 2004

Washington, Jan. 24 (Reuters): Former chief US arms hunter David Kay, who stepped down from his post yesterday, has concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, a potential embarrassment for President George W. Bush and ammunition to his election-year Democratic rivals.

But a senior US official said today that Vice-President Dick Cheney, attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, still believed “the jury’s still out” on whether Iraq had chemical or biological weapons or missiles, as contained in official US intelligence estimates.

Undercutting the White House’s public rationale for the war on Iraq, Kay said that he had concluded there were no such stockpiles to be found.

“I don’t think they existed,” Kay said. “What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don’t think there was a large-scale production programme in the 1990s,” he said.

“I think we have found probably 85 per cent of what we’re going to find,” said Kay, who returned from Iraq in December and told the CIA that he would not be going back.

“I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production and that’s what we’re really talking about,” Kay said.

In his annual State of the Union address on Tuesday, Bush again insisted that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had actively pursued dangerous weapons programmes right up to the start of the US-led invasion in March.

“Had we failed to act,” Bush said, “the dictator’s weapons of mass destruction programmes would continue to this day.”

The UN’s top nuclear watchdog said today he was not surprised at Kay’s conclusion. “I am not surprised about this,” International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed El Baradei said on the sidelines of the Davos meeting. “We said already before the war, that there was no evidence of this, so this is really not a surprise.”

White House firm

Yesterday, the White House stood firm. “We remain confident that the Iraq Survey Group will uncover the truth about Saddam Hussein’s regime, the regime’s weapons of destruction programs,” spokesman Scott McClellan said.

The CIA announced that former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who has expressed his own doubts that unconventional weapons would be found, would succeed Kay as Washington's chief arms hunter.

Duelfer, 51, a former deputy executive chairman of the UN Special Commission that was responsible for dismantling Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, previously expressed doubts that unconventional weapons would be found.

But after his new job was announced, Duelfer said he was keeping an open mind and his past comments had been made from the sidelines.

[David Kay on Iraqi WMD search.]

Iraq Arms Inspector Casts Doubt on WMD Claims
NPR Weekend Edition -- January 24, 2004

[Juan Williams gives a truly hideous performance as a newsman by failing to press Cheney on obvious falsehoods. Follow the link to listen to the audio.]

Cheney: U.S. to Continue Search for Iraqi WMD
Vice President Also Cites Al Qaeda-Saddam Connection
NPR's Morning Edition -- January 22, 2004

Jan. 22, 2004 -- Vice President Dick Cheney says the hunt in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction will go on and he insists that there were ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. In an interview with NPR's Juan Williams, Cheney also says the United Nations has a potential role to play in Iraq's political transition.

Cheney says the United States hasn't given up on finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was one of the major arguments President Bush made in going to war to topple Saddam. Cheney cites an interim report by David Kay, who led the WMD search, as saying that the Iraqi government had programs designed to produce such weapons. "I think the jury is still out...," Cheney says.

"It's going to take some additional considerable period of time in order to look in all of the cubby holes and ammo dumps in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that," Cheney says