The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
618.
On
28 January, Dr Kay gave evidence to the Senate Armed Services
Committee.341
In his
opening remarks, he stated:
“A great
deal has been accomplished by the [ISG] team … I think it important
that it
goes on and
it is allowed to reach its full conclusion. In fact, I really
believe it ought
to be
better resourced and totally focused on WMD …
“But I also
believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we
got
here
…
“It turns
out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgement, and that is
most
disturbing
…
“In my
judgement … Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of resolution
1441…
“We have
discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents,
physical
evidence
and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited
under the
initial UN
resolution 687 [1991] and that should have been reported under
1441, with
Iraqi
testimony that not only did they not tell the UN about this, they
were instructed
not to do
it and they hid material.
“I had
innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world we
were
finding was
not the world they had thought existed …
“I wish it
had been undue influence, because we know how to correct that
…
The fact
that it wasn’t tells me we’ve got a much more fundamental problem
of
understanding
what went wrong …
“I regret
to say that I think at the end of the work of the ISG there’s still
going to be
an
unresolvable ambiguity about what happened.
“A lot of
that traces to the failure on April 9 [2003] to establish
immediately physical
security in
Iraq – the unparalleled looting and destruction, a lot of which was
directly
intentional,
designed by the [Iraqi] security services to cover the tracks of
the Iraq
WMD program
and their other programs as well …”
619.
Asked whether
it was too early to pronounce that everyone had been wrong,
that
weapons
might still be hidden, Dr Kay replied:
“It’s
theoretically possible … When the ISG wraps up its work … there are
still going
to be
people to say, ‘You didn’t look everywhere. Isn’t it possible it
was hidden
someplace?”
and the answer has got to be honestly, ‘Yes, it’s possible’
…
341
Centre for
Research on Globalisation, 28 January 2004, Dr David
Kay’s Testimony to the Senate
Armed Services
Committee.
546