BLAME GAME.(The Talk of the Town)(intelligence services and the Iraq War)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 09-FEB-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here." Thus David A. Kay, the Central Intelligence Agency's former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, publicly confirmed what had become increasingly obvious: the assertions that Saddam Hussein possessed arsenals of weapons of mass destruction posing an international threat were false. Kay, who has spent much of the last nine months in Baghdad heading the Iraq Survey Group, told Reuters, "I think there were stockpiles at the end of the first Gulf War. . . . A combination of U.N. inspectors and unilateral Iraqi action got rid of them." As for Iraq's nuclear program, which the American and British governments claimed could, under certain circumstances, produce a crude atomic bomb within a year, Kay said, "It really wasn't dormant, because there were a few little things going on, but it had not resumed in anything meaningful."

Kay's findings are all the more striking...

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