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Invasion of Iraq: Defending Aggression: The David Kay Report
Posted on Sunday, February 01 @ 15:00:18 UTC
Topic: Bush-Saddam
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 By Mike Whitney
January 30, 2004
"We were all wrong"
David Kay
We can finally put Weapons of Mass Destruction issue to rest.
With the publishing of the Kay report it is clear that the entire pretense for the Iraq war was nothing more than a hoax. Kay appeared before a Senate subcommittee to disclose his findings and admitted that he and his team had found no stockpiles of proscribed weapons in Iraq.
At one point he opined, "We were wrong, we were all wrong."
Wrong?
An estimated 8,000 innocent Iraqis died in the invasion, more than 500 American servicemen were killed in action, an entire country was destabilized and plunged into insurgency, and David Kay talks about being wrong like it was some minor miscalculation on the phone bill?
This is the reality of the Bush Administration's new "preemptive" theory; hundreds of billions of dollars are spent, countless lives are lost or ruined, and the world community is thrown into turmoil, and yet, no justification is provided.
Even worse, the head of the weapons inspection team presents his case to Congress as though it was all "just an honest mistake".
So, why did Kay choose to address the Senate in the first place?
After all, Kay has been a reliable Bush loyalist, and that hasn't changed.
Kay's real intention in addressing the Senate was to use the CIA as a scapegoat for the bad information that led to the war. Now, that the election is approaching, the President's chief advisor, Karl Rove, is trying to put as much distance as he can between the White House and the myriad lies about the non-existent weapons.
This is a delicate situation and has to be handled with great subtlety or intelligence agencies will see that Bush is trying to bury them in the media. Hence, the appearance of David Kay is intended to reinforce the false notion that the war was the result of faulty intelligence. Kay's testimony challenged the reliability of intelligence gathering methods and suggested that we may need a "major overhaul" of the intelligence services.
Absent from the testimony was any detailed recounting of the many fabrications that were repeated with propaganda-like precision to support the war. Also, absent was the clear implication that the Administration was directly involved in "cherry-picking" intelligence to suit its own purposes.
Apart from Senator Edward Kennedy, there was no mention of the fact that the Vice President was pressuring the CIA with frequent visits to produce information that was compatible with his own warmongering objectives, or that an Office of Special Plans was developed in the Pentagon for the expressed purpose of selectively manufacturing evidence that Saddam was a threat.
Most of this passed by completely unnoticed. Instead, the Administration has adroitly used its main inspector to "move the shells" one more time, and shift the blame onto the undeserving CIA.
But, the CIA doesn't create policy and it doesn't make the decision to go to war; the President does.
The CIA was skeptical about the Iraq threat from the very beginning. Its reluctance to endorse the Bush preemptive policy was evident in an earlier report that clearly stated that a war in Iraq would increase the likelihood of terrorism in the region and, perhaps, force Saddam to give whatever weapons he had to terrorist organizations.
This warning was ignored.
It seems only appropriate that Kay would give his report on a day when six more American servicemen and eleven more Iraqis were killed. His loyalty to the Bush policy of unprovoked aggression provides an interesting contrast to the grim facts on the ground. Men and women are dying every day in what we know now was an entirely avoidable war.
The testimony of David Kay only confirms that point.
This article is published here with permission from the author. It was originally published in counterpunch.org. Mike Whitney can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com
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