Word: kayes
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...Still, Kay's team kept looking. Some agency analysts had predicted that a number of mysterious mobile trailers found in Iraq were for the manufacture of biological weapons. These staff members were shipped out to the field to prove their hunch. Kay reported that several returned deeply upset from the trailers, which, it turned out, were for manufacturing hydrogen for use in weather balloons. "They said to me, 'I'm sorry we can't find what we told you existed,'" Kay recalled. Yet some analysts would not give up the fight. Kay told of a months-long...
What CIA analysts imagined to be dispositive evidence of Saddam's nuclear ambitions turned out, in Kay's judgment, to be proof of plain, old-fashioned greed. For months the Administration claimed that finely machined aluminum tubes, imported with ever higher tolerances--that is, precision in their specifications--were part of a campaign to produce gas centrifuges for the production of weapons-grade nuclear fuel. But after examining the tubes and talking to the scientists who procured and used them, Kay became convinced that the increasing tolerances were to meet not technical requirements but financial ones. The ever changing tolerances...
Tales of machine-shop graft make clear that Saddam had a variety of secret ambitions, and, Kay said repeatedly last week, the Iraqis were doing all kinds of things in violation of international law. But the unspannable gap between the Administration's vast prewar claims and a thin postwar reality has irritated some members of Congress. Democrats complain that they had been duped, and in private some Republicans say they feel the same. Ohio Senator Mike DeWine, a Republican on the Intelligence Committee, told the Columbus Dispatch that he was not sure he would vote to authorize war with Iraq...
...senior White House official told TIME that Bush might go along with a blue-ribbon panel, though the President wants to let the Iraq Survey Group continue its work. With Kay having resigned his post, the group is now under the leadership of Charles Duelfer, another veteran arms inspector. Bush, the official said, continues to stand by Tenet, in part because foreign intelligence agencies also missed the WMD. Besides, the source added, Bush is "very willing to go out and discuss why [war] was the right thing to do. He is as sure of this as he is of anything...
...Kay's tale is a reminder that there is no substitute for on-the-ground human intelligence--the very kind that U.S. spymasters have lacked in Iraq and elsewhere for years. The U.S. overestimated the current WMD program in Iraq, but it underestimated WMD operations in Iraq before the 1991 war and, more recently, in Libya, Iran and perhaps North Korea. The shortfall in humint is everyone's fault. Administrations going back to the mid-1970s have favored more technical means of eavesdropping over sending spies into danger...