Kay, who was the head of the Iraq Survey Group, defended the Bush administration’s main rationale for going to war against Iraq—namely that the regime of Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat to “America.” His arguments strengthened those pushing Washington’s strategy of preemption against “terrorists.” Kay’s claim of “intelligence failures” leading up to the Iraq war is also now being widely used by top U.S. government officials to fortify the CIA and other spy agencies.

In his February 4 testimony before the same Senate committee, U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld reiterated one of the main views Kay had expressed before the body January 28. He urged the senators to “step back and take a look at the bigger picture and see that U.S. intelligence capabilities are strengthened sufficiently to meet the threats and challenges of this century.” CIA director George Tenet hit on similar themes in a February 5 address at Georgetown University, as did President George Bush in an interview aired February 8 on NBC TV’s “Meet the Press” (see article linked below).

Better “intelligence,” i.e., more effective spying at home and abroad, is a central component of the U.S. rulers’ “war on terrorism.”

“The president has announced that he will be forming a bipartisan commission on strengthening U.S. intelligence capabilities,” Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The hearings by this committee are designed to satisfy most in the ruling class on the administration’s rationale for the war on Iraq and to broaden support for U.S. imperialism’s new military strategy. The U.S.-led occupying forces have not found “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) in Iraq nine months after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime. Kay said his assessment is that no such weapons existed at the start of the war. Liberal critics of the White House have used this statement to buttress their drive to defeat Bush in this year’s presidential elections by claiming the Bush administration manipulated CIA reports to justify going to war in Iraq.

Both Kay and Rumsfeld, however, denied that administration officials had done anything of the sort. Kay said the accusation is “absolutely wrong.” Asked if he knew of any action by White House officials to pressure CIA analysts to provide reports that would support the administration’s claims for war, Rumsfeld answered, “absolutely not.”

Kay emphatically backed the administration’s decision to invade and occupy Iraq. “I think the world is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein,” he said. “I think that when we have the complete record, you’re going to discover that after 1998, it became a regime that was totally corrupt. Individuals were out for their own protection, and in a world where we know others are seeking WMD, the likelihood at some point in the future of a seller and a buyer meeting up would have made that a far more dangerous country than even we anticipated.”

In an appearance on the NBC Today show Kay said that the Bush administration decision to go to war was “absolutely prudent.” Kay made a strong case from the point of view of the ruling class for Washington’s strategy of preemptively striking groups and governments like that of Saddam Hussein to prevent them from developing their potential to obtain nuclear, chemical, or biological weaponry.

“I think at the end of the inspection process,” Kay told NBC’s Today program, “we’ll paint a picture of an Iraq that was far more dangerous than even we thought it was before the war. It was a system collapsing. It was a country that had the capability in weapons-of-mass-destruction areas and in which terrorists, like ants to honey, were going after it.”

Stressing the urgent need to strengthen U.S. spy power, Kay pointed to the extent of the development of nuclear capabilities in Iran and Libya. “I don’t think the problem of global proliferation of weapons technology of mass destruction is going to go away,” Kay told the committee.

“We’re also in a period in which we’ve had intelligence surprises in the proliferation area that go the other way,” he continued. “The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the Iranians admit was 18 years on, that we underestimated. And, in fact, we didn’t discover it. It was discovered by a group of Iranian dissidents outside the country who pointed the international community at the location.

“The Libyan program recently discovered was far more extensive than was assessed prior to that.”

Kay closed his opening remarks to the congressional committee by recalling that in the fall of 1962 “the combined estimate was unanimity in the intelligence service that there were no Soviet warheads in Cuba.”

“But the most important thing about that story,” he added, was that “immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.”  
 
Rumsfeld builds on Kay’s remarks
Rumsfeld made a similar point at his February 4 appearance before the Senate committee. “During my confirmation hearing before this committee, I was asked what would keep me up at night,” he noted. “And I answered, ‘Intelligence.’ I said that because the challenge facing the intelligence community today is truly difficult. Their task is to penetrate closed societies.”

Rumsfeld emphasized the continuity between the Clinton and Bush administration on Washington’s policy towards Iraq. He said that, “Congress, the national security teams of both the Clinton and Bush administrations looked at essentially the same intelligence and they came to similar conclusions” about toppling the Iraqi regime. “The Congress passed regime-change legislation in 1998,” he reminded the committee, adding later that “based on the same intelligence, you voted to support military action if the Iraqi regime failed to take that final opportunity to cooperate with the United Nations.”

Rumsfeld said that “what we have learned thus far has not proven Saddam Hussein had what intelligence indicated and what we believed we had, but it also has not proven the opposite…. I’m convinced that the president of the United States did the right thing in Iraq; let there be no doubt. I came to my conclusions based on the intelligence we all saw, just as each of you made your judgments and cast your votes based on the same information.”

CIA director Tenet hit on similar themes in his speech at Georgetown University, organized at the request of the spy agency. “Intelligence has never been more important to the security of our country,” Tenet said.

The current administration is “rebuilding our intelligence—with powerful capabilities,” he emphasized. In a warning to opponents of the administration who have pressed for an investigation into the accuracy of U.S. spy reports, Tenet said, “politicized, haphazard evaluation, without the benefit of time and fact—may well result in an intelligence community that is damaged.”

Tenet stressed that testimony by Kay last fall had verified the agency’s assertions, including that Hussein was committed to developing missiles with ranges beyond the limits set by the UN; had held secret negotiations with north Korea to obtain advanced missile technology; and was without doubt trying to obtain nuclear weapons.

Tenet also used the occasion to defend the CIA’s record of so-called human intelligence capabilities, or spies on the ground. He boasted that a rebuilt “clandestine service” had resulted in the capture of: Khalid Sheik Muhammad, whom Washington accused of being the “mastermind” behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon; al Qaeda’s supposed “operational chief” responsible for organizing the bombing of the U.S. warship, USS Cole; and another leader of al Qaeda, who allegedly organized the bombing of a nightclub in Bali.

Rumsfeld praised Tenet’s remarks, saying, “He did something that I expressed hope he might do, and that was to talk a little bit about all the successes.”
 
 
Related articles:
Bush on TV: ‘I am a war president’
Another boost for war party  
 
 
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