FREE DAILY EMAIL

Davi d A Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, called yesterday for an independent inquiry into prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programmes, but he said he did not believe that the Bush administration had pressured intelligence analysts to exaggerate the threat, the New York Times reports.

The White House immediately turned aside the calls from Kay and many democrats for an immediate outside investigation, seeking to head off any new wide-ranging election-year inquiry that might go beyond reports already being assembled by Congressional committees and the Central Intelligence Agency. Proponents of an independent investigation said they wanted an explanation of the gap between the intelligence cited by President Bush and his cabinet in making a case for war and Kay's conclusion that Iraq did not have any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons by the time the conflict began.

"It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgment," Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"And that is most disturbing”. In his testimony, Kay repeated his conclusions made public in a series of interviews with news organizations over the past five days that intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs had turned out to be, at a minimum, out of date.

The White House left open the possibility that it would eventually undertake a broad review of whether the CIA and other intelligence agencies are properly structured to fight the proliferation of unconventional weapons. There are some indications that the administration is divided about whether to call for such a review, and whether one could be undertaken without focusing criticism on George J Tenet, the director of central intelligence, or fueling election-year criticism that Bush misled the nation in asserting that Iraq posed a grave threat.

Administration officials defended the overall performance of the intelligence services in fighting the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons to so-called rogue nations including Iran, North Korea and Libya.

They said they would not draw any conclusions about the case of Iraq until the organisation that Kay headed until last week, the Iraq Survey Group, finished looking for evidence of weapons programmes.

Kay warned, though, of an "unresolved ambiguity" over many aspects of Hussein's weapons program, as a result of the looting of documents, laboratories and military bases - some of it petty vandalism and some, he said, probably organized to hide evidence. "A lot of that traces to the failure on April 9 to establish immediately physical security in Iraq," he added in an implied criticism of the American military effort in the days after Baghdad fell.

His testimony, and the partisan exchanges in the hearing room over whether what he described as an intelligence failure undermined the rationale for going to war, underscored the problem facing President Bush as he tries to deal with the political and diplomatic fallout from Kay's statements.

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said the administration did not want any outside inquiry until the Iraq Survey Group finished its work.

He said the timetable for its final report should be set by Charles Duelfer, who was appointed last week to succeed Kay as the group's leader. Duelfer said last week that he did not know how long he would need or whether he would meet Kay's old goal of finishing by this summer.

"It's important that we gather all the facts, that we look at all that information and compare it to what we knew before the war," McClellan said.

"That's important. But first, before we can draw firm conclusions, we need to let the Iraq Survey Group complete its work".

Kay told the Senate committee that one of the main reasons he stepped down was that the military diverted some of the people and other resources that it had committed to the Iraq Survey Group to identifying and hunting down Iraqi insurgents.

Administration officials pointed out yesterday that an internal review had been started at the CIA before Kay began commenting publicly, and that Tenet was due to deliver his assessment of the CIA's performance to the Senate Intelligence Committee next month.

A senior official on Capitol Hill said yesterday that members of Congress involved in inquiries into the faulty intelligence on Iraq were now pursuing two hypotheses, both focusing on the possible failure of analysts to question the assumption that the Iraqi government was producing illicit weapons. "Either the intelligence analysts just created their own inertia and couldn't get out of it, or the inertia was created from the top down by Tenet and his crowd," the senior official said.

In an interview last fall at the CIA's headquarters, several senior intelligence officials defended their prewar judgments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting its nuclear program.

But in outlining the evidence that prompted those conclusions, they also repeatedly acknowledged that they had been based on circumstantial, fragmentary data.

"You don't always get it right, but you fundamentally know that you're going to put this stuff together by figuring out really small indicators, subtle things they don't understand you can do, eventually piecing that together as a story," one senior intelligence official said.

"You may find out some day that some of the indicators weren't correct," that official continued.

"But most of the time we find out that some of the subtle things we did were really quite right and honest".

The review is being headed by Richard Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence. As described by senior intelligence officials, his task is to compare the prewar intelligence assessments with facts on the ground, and to draw conclusions about what errors, if any, were made.

In an e-mail message last week, before Kay stepped down, Kerr declined to answer questions about his inquiry.

Intelligence officials from agencies outside the CIA said his inquiry had touched on their work as well.

The president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is headed by Brent Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general and a former national security adviser, has also looked into the matter, administration officials have said.

Scowcroft and other members of the panel have declined to discuss their work.

During Kay's appearance on Capitol Hill yesterday, Republicans and Democrats alike posed narrow queries to elicit specific responses, highlighting the political stakes.

Republicans sought evidence to bolster the administration's case for war - and to prove that no officials knowingly shaded intelligence findings - while Democrats used Kay as a foil to criticize the administration for starting war without what they view as proper cause.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, read a list of pointed statements to Kay: "Saddam Hussein developed and used weapons of mass destruction. He used them against the Iranians and the Kurds. UN inspectors found enormous quantities of banned chemical and biological weapons in Iraq in the 90s.

We know that Saddam Hussein had once a very active nuclear programme. He realised and had ambitions to develop and use weapons of mass destruction".

To each, Kay responded "yes" or "absolutely" or "clearly".

But Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is his party's ranking committee member, quoted at length from President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in statements to the public that Hussein had stockpiles of unconventional weapons.

"The administration, in order to support its decision to go to war, made numerous vivid, unqualified statements about Iraq having in its possession weapons of mass destruction - not programmes, not programme-related activities, not intentions - actual weapons is what the administration's statements focused on," Senator Levin said.

Another Democrat, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, was even more accusatory: "Many of us feel that the evidence so far leads only to one conclusion, that what has happened was more than a failure of intelligence; it was the result of manipulation of the intelligence to justify a decision to go to war".

But Senator John Warner, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, echoed the White House response to Kay's comments in recent days, saying repeatedly that it was too early to pass judgment on prewar intelligence.

"The work to collect the facts from which final assessments have to be made and such corrections as may be necessary to our intelligence system - that has yet to come about," Senator Warner said.

Throughout the hearing, Kay was adamant that the Iraq Survey Group had found no evidence that the Hussein government or military held any large stockpiles of unconventional weapons when America invaded last March.

But he also told the panel, "If I had been there, presented what I have seen as the record of the intelligence estimates, I probably would have come to —- not probably - I would have come to the same conclusion that the political leaders did".

Asked by Senator McCain whether it would take an outside inquiry to find out what went wrong and hold accountable the people responsible, Kay replied that "it's important to acknowledge failure" and that secretive institutions are easier to reform with input from the outside.

"I must say, my personal view, and it's purely personal, is that in this case you will finally determine that it is going to take an outside inquiry, both to do it and to give yourself and the American people the confidence that you have done it," Kay said – New York Times.

SPONSORED BY

Advanced