The outgoing chief US weapons inspector says his inability to find illicit arms in Iraq raises serious questions about American intelligence-gathering.
Last year, David Kay had confidently predicted weapons would be found. But after nine months of searching, he said Sunday: "I don't think they exist."
"It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information," Kay said on National Public Radio.
Asked whether US President George W. Bush owed the nation an explanation for the discrepancies between his warnings and Kay's findings, Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people."
The CIA would not comment on Kay's remarks, though one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that Kay himself was vocal in predicting he would find weapons.
Kay said his predictions were not "coming back to haunt me in the sense that I am embarrassed. They are coming back to haunt me in the sense of `Why could we all be so wrong?'"
The White House stuck by its assertions that illicit weapons will be found in Iraq.
But Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Kay's comments reinforced his belief that the Bush administration had exaggerated the threat Iraq posed.
"It confirms what I have said for a long period of time, that we were misled -- misled not only in the intelligence, but misled in the way that the president took us to war," Kerry said on Fox News Sunday. "I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception."
Kay's comments came as no surprise to Hans Blix, the former chief UN inspector whose work was heavily criticized by Kay and came to an end when the US went to war with Iraq.
Blix said the US should have known the intelligence was flawed last year when leads followed up by UN inspectors didn't produce any results.
"I was beginning to wonder what was going on. Weren't they wondering too?" he said by telephone. Speaking of Kay's resignation, Blix said, "If you find yourself on a train that's going in the wrong direction, it's best to get off at the next stop."
Kay told The New York Times in a later interview for yesterday's editions that US intelligence agencies did not realize Iraqi scientists presented Saddam with fanciful plans for weapons programs and then used the money he authorized for other purposes.
"The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process," Kay told the Times. "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."
Kay said Iraq did try to restart its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001, but that evidence suggests it would have taken years to rebuild after being largely abandoned in the 1990s.
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