Rohan Pearce
Little more than a week and a half after the publication of a book on the career of US President George Bush's former treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, in which O'Neill confessed he "never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction [WMD]" while a member of Bush's cabinet, the White House's credibility has suffered yet another blow.
David Kay, head of the CIA-run International Survey Group that was tasked with finding WMDs in Iraq following the US-led invasion, announced his retirement on January 23. He admitted that he believed the WMD stockpiles that Washington claimed Iraq possessed did not exist.
In an interview with Reuters, conducted on the day he retired, Kay said: "What everyone was talking about is [WMD] stockpiles produced after the end of the last [1991] Gulf War. I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the 1990s. I think the best evidence is that [Iraq] did not resume large-scale production and that's what we're really talking about."
On January 27, a reporter asked US President George Bush if he was "still confident that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, given what Dr Kay has said?". Bush refused to directly answer the question, instead claiming that Saddam Hussein's regime had been "a gathering threat to America".
At a January 28 press briefing, journalists pressed White House spokesperson Scott McClellan to respond to Kay's revelations. Instead, McClellan also used the "gathering threat" catch-phrase six times to describe Iraq and Hussein, before stating that he was not "going to get into prejudging the outcome of [the ISG's] work".
Kay has been replaced by Charles Duelfer, a former UN weapons inspector who has openly questioned claims that Iraq had WMDs at the time of the invasion. Bush is resisting calls for an inquiry into his regime's pre-war WMD intelligence until the ISG has "finished" its inspections.
From Green Left Weekly, February 4, 2004.
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