WMD Report possibly delayed

The Washington Times, generally viewed as a paper with a strong conservative bias, is reporting that according to The Sunday Times of London, David Kay's promised update on the search for WMD in Iraq is being delayed and may never be released. Interestingly, however, I've not seen much reporting about this in any other sources. Given the Washington Times' general bias, however, I tend to consider a report from them indicating that Kay's update may not support the Bush/Blair administration's claims as more likely to be accurate than I would a similar article stating that the report would support them, but I'm still a bit trepidatious about their reliability on this, and will be keeping an eye out for additional information.

Obviously, if the report is delayed and the contents withheld, it will be bigger news in London, where there are increasing calls for Tony Blair to resign over charges he misled his nation into joining Bush's war on Iraq that it likely will be here, especially considering that any report further undercutting Blair's case could put him in a position of being forced to resign.

Back in August, Reuters reported that Kay claimed "solid progress" was being made in the WMD hunt.

"We are making solid progress. And as is with most progress it is preliminary. We are not at the final stage of understanding fully Iraq's WMD program or having found WMD weapons," said David Kay, who recently returned from Iraq where he was sent as a CIA special adviser to develop a strategy for finding weapons of mass destruction

[...] Kay said Iraqi scientists who were "collaborating and cooperating" and freshly unearthed documents have led the WMD hunting team to new, previously unknown sites in Iraq. Physical evidence has been collected, but he declined to describe it.

"We are taking this apart as if it were a criminal conspiracy, which in many ways it is. So you start with taking apart the various elements of the program to get you to the end which we all want to find out -- if there were weapons and, if so, what happened to those weapons," Kay said.

Additionally, according to the UN News Wire: Kay and Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee had sounded fairly confident that they would have a "surprise to report", and at the time, it was expected that the "surprise" would be revealed in September.

Conservative columnist Robert Novak recently indicated that Kay's upcoming report will aim to take the heat off the administration: "Former international weapons inspector David Kay... has privately reported successes that are planned to be revealed to the public in mid-September."

The UN Wire article did note that Kay did, however, caveat the possible announcement of a surprise.

Kay cautioned, though, that no significant find will be made public unless three criteria are met: multiple Iraqis providing information about the find, multiple documents explaining it and physical evidence showing a connection to weapons of mass destruction activities.

A week ago, Thomas Paine.com did an overview on David Kay and his career, and concluded that he sounded like "the perfect 'yes' man" for the administration to serve as the special advisor for the weapons hunt, and indicated that Kay has what appear to be some conflicts of interest and a possible pre-disposition to finding evidence of WMDs.

"Kay's experience and background make him the ideal person for this new role," Tenet said when he announced the appointment. "His understanding of the history of the Iraqi 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."

Kay's no stranger to the CIA. In fact, he was fired from his position as deputy director of UNSCOM's Iraq Action Team in the early 1990s because of his contacts with the U.S. intelligence community, according to Gordon Prather, the army's chief scientist during the Reagan years.

[...] Kay is also involved with one of the nation's major defense contractors, serving as a senior vice president for the San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which received about two-thirds of its $6 billion revenue last year from the U.S. Treasury, according to a report by Katrin Dauenhauer and Jim Lobe in Asia Times.

Aside from homeland security projects, SAIC has already won several reconstruction contracts in Iraq, and Kay along with other former company employees are firmly planted in country. The company has headed up the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council (IRDC) since the Pentagon established the body was in February, according to the Asia Times report, and also runs the recently established Iraqi Media Network (IMN) project, charged with building a new information ministry, complete with television, radio and a newspaper. SAIC is also a subcontractor under Vinnell Corporation, which has been training the Saudi National Guard for a long time, and is now responsible for pulling together and training a new Iraqi army.

So David Kay has some personal interest in keeping up U.S. appearances in Iraq, including the image that we invaded the country for legitimate reasons. That and his die-hard loyalty to the Bush administration means he'll be spinning the upcoming report as hard and as positively as he can.

If this is an accurate analysis of Kay's potential outlook on the project, a report from him showing that there is little to support the Bush/Blair contentions could be that much more devastating. It would, at the very least, make it harder for conservatives to dismiss the report as suffering from a liberal bias or desire to make Bush look bad.

Still, all of this is at least somewhat speculatory unless the report is actually released to the public, but it'll be interesting to watch and see what other information comes out about it.

Posted by thorswitch at September 16, 2003 02:16 AM | TrackBack