It has been widely reported that outgoing Iraq Survey Group Director David Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 28 that "we were almost all wrong." It has not been widely reported that Kay said that even Iraqi Republican Guard generals believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Kay did not even rule out that Saddam himself might have believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Here are the pertinent excerpts from this testimony:
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R.-Ala.): I believe at one point you noted that even his own military officers believed they had them [WMD]. In other words, they would think??¢â???¬ ¦quot;
David Kay: ??¢â???¬ ¦quot;that someone else had them.
Sessions: Could you explain that?
Kay: Well, in interviewing the Republican Guard generals and Special Republican Guard generals and asking about their capabilities and having them, the assurance was they didn't personally have them and hadn't seen them, but the units on their right or left had them. And as you worked the way around the circle of those defending Baghdad, which is the immediate area of concern, you have got this very strange phenomena of no, I don't have them, I haven't seen them, but look to my right and left. That was an intentional ambiguity.
And realize freedom of discussion and movement was not something encouraged in Iraq. For example, Republican Guard divisions never entered into the city limits of Baghdad. Only the SRG [Special Republican Guard] was allowed to. You didn't even train in multidivisional units because of that issue of his concern about them. It was a powerful deception technology. We have it [WMD], but we haven't seen it, but we know that someone else has it.
Sessions: And it is true, I think no one can dispute, that had he not had these weapons of mass destruction and had opened his country and plainly demonstrated it, this war would have been avoided.
Kay: Yes, I think that's true. And that's one??¢â???¬ ¦quot;always been one of the mysteries for all of us to determine: how??¢â???¬ ¦quot;why would he have run this risk that cost him his regime and the death of members of his family if he didn't have those weapons?
Sen. Susan Collins (R.-Maine): I'm intrigued by the interviews that you conducted with some of the Iraqi scientists who outlined a plan of deception of their own where [they] may have told Saddam what he wanted to hear for fear of the consequences to them if they said they couldn't deliver on certain weapons. That leads me to ask you, do you believe that Saddam himself believed that he had these stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons? I realize it's in some ways an unanswerable question. But what is your feeling on that? What's your judgment?
Kay: It's one of the toughest questions around, and we've just got little pieces of evidence, so let me tell you now what I believe, because I don't know, but??¢â???¬ ¦quot;or what I think is true, but what I??¢â???¬ ¦quot;the evidence shows.
We have these questions about 'How long will it take you to produce . . .?' That sounds like he knows he doesn't have anything, and so he's asking for restarts of production. And these included Saddam, Usay??¢â???¬ ¦quot;Uday and Qusay. There are other reports from the interrogation at times Saddam referred to secret stockpiles, a??¢â???¬ ¦quot;you know, small amounts that was existing: no confirmation of that. My suspicion is that he probably thought he was closer to getting it to restart faster than it??¢â???¬ ¦quot;than these scientists and engineers actually know it would take. So when it really came down, these??¢â???¬ ¦quot;these requests, one in 2000, and I think it's 2001, in which they gave him estimates that were longer than he obviously had expected them to be was when they were confronting the truth. I think he knew??¢â???¬ ¦quot;he had been told they got rid of it all, but that we could really turn the tap on very quickly, and it turned out they lied about how quickly??¢â???¬ ¦quot;it was quickly, but it wasn't as quick as he anticipated. But this is one of those areas, as Sen. [John] Warner [R.-Va.] correctly keeps referring to, as where the investigation really does need to continue.
