IraqGate: Scientists Still Deny Iraqi Arms Programs

posted by ewing2001 on Wednesday July 30, @08:02PM

US Scientist David Kay, with SAIC-ties wants to "help out" today

Scientists Still Deny Iraqi Arms Programs

U.S. Interrogations Net No Evidence

By Walter Pincus and Kevin Sullivan
WP -Thursday, July 31, 2003; Page A01

Photo: David Kay (ex-SAIC)

Despite vigorous efforts, the U.S. government has been unsuccessful so far in finding key senior Iraqi scientists to support its prewar claims that former president Saddam Hussein was pursuing an aggressive program to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, according to senior administration officials and members of Congress who have been briefed recently on the subject.

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The sources said four senior scientists and more than a dozen at lower levels who worked for the Iraqi government have been interviewed by U.S. officials under the direction of the CIA. Some scientists have been arrested and held for months, others have made deals in return for information and at least one has agreed to be interviewed outside Iraq.

No matter the circumstances, all of the scientists interviewed have denied that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program or developed and hidden chemical or biological weapons since United Nations inspectors left in 1998. Several key Iraqi officials questioned the significance of evidence cited by the Bush administration to suggest that Hussein was stepping up efforts to develop new weapons of mass destruction programs.

...David Kay, the CIA's representative in Iraq to coordinate the search for weapons of mass destruction, returned to Washington this week and met with President Bush on Tuesday. Kay is scheduled to appear today before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Infos on David Kay:

http://www.potomacinstitute.org/who/staff_kay.cfm
Dr. David Kay, Senior Research Fellow

Currently Dr. David Kay is a Senior Fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies with a concentration on counterterrorism and homeland security issues.

He was formerly a Corporate Senior Vice President at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). He was a leader in SAIC's efforts to support the U.S. Government's counter-terrorism initiatives and efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

He served as the UN's Chief Nuclear Weapons Inspector, leading numerous inspections into Iraq following the end of the Gulf War to determine Iraqi nuclear weapons production capability. He led teams that found and identified the scope and extent of Iraqi uranium enrichment activities, located the major Iraqi center for assembly of nuclear weapons, and seized large amounts of documents on the Iraqi nuclear weapons program, spending four days as a Saddam hostage in a Baghdad parking lot. He also led the analysis of the nature of the Iraqi nuclear program and its implications for non-proliferation and arms control activities.

Dr. Kay has frequently testified before Congress, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Quarterly and The New Republic, and a number of scholarly journals. He also has appeared on Nightline, McNeal-Lehrer, Today, Good Morning America, CNN and the evening news programs of PBS, ABC, CBS and NBC and has been a frequent BBC commentator on nuclear and defense matters.

He has had fifteen years of international management experience with international organizations and trade associations, including the International Atomic Energy Agency and as Secretary General of the Uranium Institute, in London, United Kingdom, which is the international industrial association for energy from nuclear fuel, comprising 82 companies from 21 countries. Dr. Kay has extensive business experience in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.

He has served on a number of official U.S. government delegations and government and private advisory commissions, including the Defense Science Board, U.S. State Department's Advisory Commission on International Organizations, the Rockefeller Foundation's Advisory Group on Conflicts in International Relations, and the U.S. Delegation to the UN General Assembly.

Dr. Kay holds a BA degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master's in International Affairs and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. He is the recipient of the IAEA's Distinguished Service Award and the U.S. Secretary of State's Commendation.

SAIC

"It would help the enemy if they knew our sources"(President Bush)

SAIC is the nation's largest employee-owned research and engineering company, providing information technology, systems integration and eBusiness products and services to commercial and government customers. SAIC is not only working as a private military contractor for the Pentagon, but also for the CIA. SAIC supports the navy and air defenses of Saudi Arabia (C4 systems for the Royal Saudi Naval Forces program).

SAIC and its subsidiaries, including Telcordia Technologies, have more than 41,000 employees at offices in more than 150 cities worldwide.

baltimore.indymedia.org
By Cheryl Seal

What David Kay is leaving out of his bio these days is that until 2002, he was VP of SAIC, a company rolling in Bush defense contracts. Kay produced "retroactive" evidence of WMDs for Bush I. Now he's Bush and Tenet's pick to get the goods...tho' he was fired in 1992 from his UN job for unethical behavior. Like Bremer, Rice, Rumsfeld, and the rest of the cast of hardened corporate characters, David Kay is an overfed relic from a past rightwing hawk regime. Under Reagan, he was a chief scientist for the Pentagon as well as serving as a section chief for the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Administration of the UN) from 1983 until 1991. During this time, Hans Blix - Kay's boss - who was a man of integrity, was continually pressured by first Reagan, then Bush I. to come up with 'evidence' that oil-rich Iraq posed a sufficient nuclear threat for the US to invade (and thus to capture the oil).

In fact, until Kay came along, most experts in most western nations believed there was no evidence for an extensive WMD program in Iraq. But after the war, when Bush I needed greater validation for his actions in the run up to the 1992 election, Kay was made chief nuclear inspector for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq. UNSCOM was created in response to the Bush claims that Iraq was a hotbed of WMD weaponry that had to be 'dismantled.' Kay's investigations turned up all sorts of 'evidence' -given the time lapse from the end of the war to Kay's mission, who knows how much of it was planted -possibly all of it. Certainly the contributions of some 'defectors' have been totally dicredited. But UNSCOM produced the same sort of arrays of conveniently -in fact, unbelievably- detailed documents, all just left 'just laying around,' waiting to be found by Kay and company. The same evidence we hear reported ad infinitum and sans question on NBC, CNN, et al. Thanks to Kay's obliging efforts for Bush after Gulf War I, the stage was neatly set for Gulf War II. In fact, the entire invasion of Iraq was trumped up over the UN clause referring to WMDs.

Whenever Kay makes the rounds of the Bush-controlled media these days, he is always introduced only as 'former UN chief weapons inspector' and 'senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Research.' In short, Kay skips over several years of his interim history. Why? Maybe because during the 'missing years,' he was Vice President of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a company with extremely close ties to the Pentagon and to the Bush administration in particular. A company up to its armpits in post-war Iraqi business, not to mention secret contracts rumored to involve electronic spying. A company in which Kay is rumored to still hold a sizeable chunk of stock, one where he maintains a rich network of inside connections.

SAIC's recent history is interesting, to say the least. The company was commissioned by G. W. Bush in 2002 to construct a replica of a mobile WMD laboratory of the sort used by Saddam. This mock up, supposedly destined to be used to train teams searching for WMDs in Iraq, was designed by Stephen Hatfill, the WMD expert now being harangued into isolation and thus silence by Bush's FBI. Last spring, the Bush administration handed SAIC some of the biggest defense contract plums to be had -a billion-dollar chunk of the NexGen business and an unbelievably porky 10-year contract worth over $600 million. I bet Kay just danced a jig of joy over that one, with visions of overflowing stock returns. Just think how much gratitude a couple of billion dollars can buy. Maybe even enough to produce another round of "evidence," thus setting the stage for Gulf War III?

But back to Gulf War I's aftermath. In 1992, Kay was fired from his UN position for trying to use underhanded methods (intriguing with the CIA and Iraqi thugs) to obtain 'informants' willing to feed him whatever information he needed (true or not). One such informant appears to be Khidir Hamza, whose 'evidence' was completely discredited by 1995. However, even in the aftermath of Kay's near-disgrace, Blix refused to bad-mouth him, as a matter of gentlemanly principles. "How did Kay repay Blix for defending him?" asks highly credentialed physicist James Gordon Prather, in a June 30, 2003 interview in the Worldnet Daily website. "He repeatedly testified before congressional committees in the months preceding Operation Iraqi Freedom as to the ineptness of Blix and the U.N. inspection regimes. Kay argued that Saddam certainly had "weapons of mass destruction" that the UN inspectors would never find and that it would ultimately be necessary to invade and occupy Iraq to find them."

If you have smelled a rat by now, then you are on the right scent. To put it all together, here is a time line that shows how the David Kay-Bush-phony evidence story all stitches together.

1983-1988: Kay worked under Ronald Reagan as a chief scientist in the Pentagon.

1983-1992: Kay was on the staff of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), under the direction of Hans Blix. Both Reagan and Bush I sought an excuse to invade oil-rich Iraq, and viewed 'evidence' of nukes the best motivator for the American public. Blix, however, was a man of integrity who could not be bought, and refused to be pressured, marking him forever as an 'enemy' of the Neocon hawks. European experts, both before and during Gulf War I, support Blix's conclusions that Iraq does not have nuclear weaponry, and that WMD programs, if they exist, are limited in scope.

1990-1991: Battling waning popularity, Bush makes a case for invading Iraq. According to ex-CIA agents from the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, "On September 11, 1990, President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of Congress, claimed '120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia.' But an enterprising journalist, Jean Heller, reported in the St. Petersburg Times on January 6, 1991 (a bare ten days before the Gulf War began) that commercial satellite photos taken on September 11, the day the president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup of Iraqi forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked to provide evidence to support the president’s claim, it refused to do so—and continues to refuse to this day."Thus G.W. was not the first Bush to lie during a major presidential address.

Before the war, the Bush administration hired the PR firm Hill & Knowlton to 'sell the war.' One of the most eager of its expert propagandistas was Victoria Clark (yep, that Victoria Clark). The H&K folks concoct a World War I-style lurid story of babies being yanked from incubators and left to die by Iraqi soldiers. The 15 year-old Kuwaiti girl called Nayirah, who tearfully told Congress this tale, proves to be none other than the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. She was never in Iraq during the war at all. She later admits the whole story was made up and that her performance had been coached by Clark and the others at H&K. H&K is also responsible for coaching 7 other "witnesses" of Iraqi atrocities.

1990-1992: His popularity in the wake of the war and the economy he has trashed, Bush seeks to gain stature in the run up to election 1992 by magnifying, retroactively, the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. David Kay is named to head UNSCOM's nuke search. One of the other inspectors on UNSCOM's teams was biological weapons expert David Kelly. Kay's job: go into Kuwait and Iraq and produce evidence of WMDs . Kay now claims Saddam had a 'horrifyingly' huge WMD program, including nukes in the making - that he had been, in fact, just MONTHS away from being able to launch a nuclear weapon. The message, of course: "Reelect Bush - just think what an awful fate he saved us all from!". Much of Kay's case relied on cutting tenuous deals with Iraqi "scientists" of dubious credentials and CIA operatives and with producing astoundingly (insanely, in fact) detailed documents on the alleged weapons program that had just been left laying conveniently around (sound familiar?). Although Kay produces a report that includes the allegations on Saddam's nuke program, he is removed from his position with the UN for his unethical behavior.

1995:the IAEA reveals that documents supplied to them earlier by Khirid Hamza, who claimed to be a key scientist on Sadam's nuclear program, were faked. It is also revealed that Hamza's claims about his own background were grossly exaggerated.

1992-2002: Kay begins to make the lecture circuit, whipping up the case against Saddam Hussein, keeping the "threat" alive through the Clinton years while the GOP sets its NeoCon machinery (driven by Newt Gingrich in its first stage) in motion.

1993-2002: Kay becomes the VP of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), the same company that Stephen Hatfill, a WMD expert, worked for until March 2002.

Fall 2001:SAIC is commissioned by the Pentagon to create a replica of a mobile WMD "laboratory", alleged to have been used by Saddam (was there ever such a thing - or was the "replica" created to fix an image in the mind of the military and later the public?) . The Pentagon claims the trailer is to be used as a training aide for teams seeking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq....even though Afghanistan had not yet been invaded. The primary designer/advisor of the replica? Stephen Hatfill.

Early 2002: As soon as the replica is completed, Stephen Hatfill becomes a "person of interest" to the FBI in the anthrax case. They begin to hound his every step -without ever bringing any charges or even declaring him a suspect. With suspicion for such a horrendous crime thrown on him, Hatfill is put in a position of never being able to creditably reveal any potentially damning information on the activities of SAIC or the Pentagon to light.

March 4 2002:SAIC fires Hatfill as a 'liability.'

March 2002: the Bush administration awards SAIC a massive defense contract, potentially worth at least $1 billion.

October 2002: Kay leaves SAIC and becomes a 'senior fellow' at the Potomac Institute for Policy Research, where he is thus positioned to become an 'objective expert' for nuclear weapons for the Bush administration in its run up to the war. In all of Kay's citations in the news and before interviews, he is invariably referred to as "David Kay, former chief UN weapons inspector and senior fellow at the Potomac Instsitute for Policy Research. The SAIC connection is neatly omitted.

Sept. 2002: Khidir Hamza is brought in by the Bush administration to testify before Congress to whom he makes a long list of allegations, including Saddam's closeness to weapons production, his ties to Al Queda, etc. Despite Hamza's earlier exposure as a liar, his testimony was still taken seriously by Congress and the media, and trumpeted as some of the most compelling cause for war.

February 2003: The Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council is created. A disproportionate number of the "Iraqi nationals" on this council are employees of SAIC,. including Khidir Hamza.

May 2003:Khidir Hamza is sent by the Pentagon to Iraq to head the nuclear industry there - a nice big fat reward for 'services rendered.'

June and early July 2003: pressure on Bush to find WMD 'evidence' grows. A statement made by Bush in his state of the Union address in October 2002 about Saddam's attempts to buy uranium from Africa is revealed as false. George Tenet takes the blame. Meanwhile, he has hired David Kay to lead a team of inspectors in Iraq to produce evidence of WMDs...including nukes.

And so we come full circle....back to 1992. Same game. Same players. Same lies.

UPDATE:

July 18: David Kelly, former member of UNSCOM who has been to Iraq 37 times on weapons inspections and was believed to be in the process of presenting evidence that showed that Blair doctored his "Iraq dossier," is found dead. Anyone who seriously believes this was a "suicide" probably still believes in the tooth fairy, too.

"It Was Never About a Smoking Gun"

Date: January 19, 2003

The following article by former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay first appeared in The Washington Post January 19. Permission has been granted for distribution and further republication, in English and in translation abroad and in the local press outside the United States.

Below is the byliner:

It Was Never About A Smoking Gun

By David Kay

(David Kay is a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. In 1991, he served as chief nuclear weapons inspector of UNSCOM, the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq.)

When it comes to the U.N. weapons inspection in Iraq, looking for a smoking gun is a fool's mission. That was true 11 years ago when I led the inspections there. It is no less true today -- even after the seemingly important discovery on Thursday of a dozen empty short-range missile warheads left over from the 1980s.

The only job the inspectors can expect to accomplish is confirming whether Iraq has voluntarily disarmed. That is not a task that need take months more. And last week's cache is irrelevant in answering that question, regardless of the U.N.'s final determination. That's because the answer is already clear: Iraqi is in breach of U.N. demands that it dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.

I am no apologist for the Iraqis, but not only are those warheads irrelevant to the larger argument, they could well be remnants that were overlooked, found as they were in a 25 square mile site that has a huge number of conventional warheads and rockets on it, rockets used principally in the Iran/Iraq war. The discovery was small -- the kind of thing inspectors often find -- and there's not much to be made of the warheads unless the testing shows they were once filled with VX gas.

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