Hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee

Federal News Service

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE

SUBJECT: IRAQI WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION PROGRAMS

CHAIRED BY: SENATOR JOHN WARNER (R-VA)

LOCATION: 106 DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

WITNESSES: DAVID KAY, FORMER HEAD OF THE IRAQ SURVEY GROUP

BODY:
SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Dr. Kay, let me start by joining my colleagues in thanking you for your most impressive, extraordinary public service. And we very much appreciate your being here today to share your experiences and your conclusions with us.

I am deeply troubled by what appears to be a colossal failure by our intelligence agencies. And I would note that this failure spans agencies, it spans years, but it also spans countries. It really is a global intelligence failure. It wasn't just our intelligence agencies alone that so misread this vital situation.

I personally believe that the war was justified for the reasons that Senator McCain listed as well as others. We know that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons at one point. We know that he invaded his neighbors, that he used chemical weapons to kill some 5,000 Kurdish citizens. We know that he planned to assassinate a former president of the Untied States. He shot at our planes. He violated the cease-fire agreement for the first Gulf War. He ignored numerous United Nations resolutions. So there was lots of justification to hold Saddam accountable.

But what if we're faced with making a decision where there isn't this additional justification? That is what is so frightening to me, because we make such serious life and death decisions relying on this intelligence information. I, for one, don't know whether or not to trust the intelligence estimates on North Korea now. We've turned out to be wrong in the other direction on Libya and Iran. So that's why this is so troubling to me.

It's particularly troubling because the briefings that we had were so detailed and so specific. And I want to cite an example. We had known, based on the Iraqi declarations to the U.N. inspectors, that Iraq had produced thousands of tons of deadly chemical weapons such as mustard gas, sarin and VX, as well as very large quantities of biological agents such as anthrax. And I recall being told, and I used it in my statement, that when the inspectors left in 1998, there were very large discrepancies between the weapons that were declared and the amounts that were destroyed. For example, I was told that at least 1.5 tons-tons-of deadly nerve agent, the VX, were unaccounted for. What, in your opinion, happened to all of those chemical agents and biological agents? Where did the VX and anthrax go?

MR. KAY: It's still a subject of investigation. Let me deal with the VX.

And interestingly enough, the Iraqis-we now have the records of the Iraqis as they tried to investigate that in order to get the evidence to answer UNSCOM and later UNMOVIC on that. And this is what happens at-remember, they had the ends of two chaotic wars. They had the end of the Iran-Iraq war, and they had the end of Gulf War II. One large amount of VX apparently, as they were moving it back from the-it had been forward deployed in Iraq towards the Kuwaiti border. As they were moving it back in 1991, there was a traffic accident. The truck carrying it was totally consumed in a fire. They-you know, they documented it in part, but there was the usual embarrassment of "Do we tell Saddam we've just burned up a large amount of chemical warfare agent?" So it wasn't fully reported and fully documented. They didn't do analytical sampling, so they had nothing of-and only partial records.

That now looks like an explanation that increasingly looks like it was true. Some of it was simply accounting errors that were wrong in material balance. Others are going to be in what I call this unresolved ambiguity that we may simply never know.

SEN. COLLINS: 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 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?

MR. KAY: It's one of the toughest questions around, and we've just got little pieces of evidence, so let me tell you now that I believe, because I don't know, but-or what I think is true, but what I-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-Uday and Qusay. There are other reports from the interrogation at times Saddam referred to secret stockpiles, a-you know, small amounts that was (sic) existing: no confirmation of that. My suspicion is that he probably thought he was closer to getting it to restart faster than it-than the scientists and engineers actually knew it would take. So when it really came down, these-these requests, one in 2000 and I think it's two in 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-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-it was quick, but it wasn't as quick as he anticipated. But this is one of those areas, as Senator Warner correctly keeps referring to, as where the investigation really does need to continue.

SEN. COLLINS: Thank you.

SEN. WARNER: Thank you very much, Senator.