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David Kay Flashback: Iraqi Documents Showed WMD
What happened to the internal Iraqi government documents that top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said had convinced him that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? In January 2004, Kay told Congress that the U.S. was "almost all wrong" in believing that Saddam had WMDs. But six months earlier in July 2003, Kay said he was sure Iraq had the banned weapons - based on millions of pages of internal government documents recovered from Saddam's regime. "I've already seen enough to convince me," Kay told then-NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw. "You cannot believe how many cases we have of documents and equipment that are stored in private residences," he added.
Story Continues Below Brokaw sounded convinced as well, telling his audience: "For David Kay, this is a motherlode, an estimated seven and a half miles of documents, many of them collected by US military from official buildings, but many others handed over by Iraqi civilians." Kay explained: "We're finding progress reports. They also got financial rewards from Saddam Hussein by breakthroughs, indicating breakthroughs. They actually took - went to Saddam and said 'We have made this progress.' There are records, there are audiotapes of those interviews which give us that." More than two years later, the documents that convinced Mr. Kay that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction remain a closely guarded secret, with a team of 200 Pentagon analysts reportedly still sifting through their contents. But thanks to the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, we know a little bit about what persuaded Kay that Saddam's banned weapons were a slam dunk. As Hayes reported two weeks ago, some of the titles on the Iraqi documents were quite explicit: • Correspondence between various Iraq organizations giving instructions to hide chemicals and equipment • Chemical Agent Purchase Orders (Dec. 2001) • Cleaning chemical suits and how to hide chemicals • Chemical Gear for Fedayeen Saddam • Denial and Deception of WMD and Killing of POWs • Ricin research and improvement • Memo from the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] to Hide Information from a U.N. Inspection team (1997) Of course, the Iraqi documents never led Kay's search team to the actual banned weapons themselves. But the fact that the documents exist means that only two explanations are possible. 1] Saddam Hussein was able to spirit his WMD stockpiles out of Iraq in the nearly year-long run-up to the war. Or . . . 2] Saddam had his government forge, literally, millions of pages of documents falsely indicating that he not only had WMDs, but had made extensive plans to hide them. Only one of the above options makes any sense at all. In the meantime, the Bush administration needs to stop the Pentagon's dithering and order the immediate release of the evidence described by Kay - including the "audiotapes" and "equipment" he mentioned to Brokaw. Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
Inside Cover Stories
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