Nicholas F. Benton's White House Report

In explosive testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday, David Kay, the man who recently resigned as the head of President Bush's team tasked with finding those infamous "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, demolished any notion that President Bush was telling the truth to the American people and the world about his reasons for launching a deadly and highly costly unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq last spring.

"It turns out we were almost all wrong," Kay said. The conclusions that there were stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were "fundamentally flawed," he reported. "The reality was different from our expectations."

Kay spearheaded meticulous and thorough 1,400-man search operation for the WMDs following the U.S. invasion last summer. Since the Bush administration staked its entire cause for the invasion on the existence of the WMDs, it made sure Kay had ample resources to prove its case. Kay's Iraq Survey Group (ISG) could not come up with a thing.

Kay confirmed repeatedly to the committee over six hours of testimony yesterday, "There is no evidence there were stockpiles of large or small weapons of mass destruction in 2002." He said the evidence showed that Iraq began dismantling its WMD programs after 1991 and that Hussein was "telling the truth" when he repeatedly insisted to United Nations inspectors that there were no weapons stockpiles or active programs.

Bush, of course, would not accept the findings of U.N. inspectors, insisting they were being deceived by Hussein and unwilling to push far enough.

Kay did his best to stay above the partisan fray in his testimony, but the core elements of his testimony could not be ignored. Nor, especially, could the contrast between Kay's report and the forceful assertions of leading Bush administration officials in the period leading up to the invasion, which were quoted carefully by Sen. Carl Levin at the outset of the hearing.

Republicans on the Senate committee, including its chair, Sen. John Warner, did their best to cover for the Bush administration by getting Kay to concede that there remains a "theoretical possibility" that WMDs could still be found in Iraq. But Kay was careful to outline the methodology of his group's work to point out that, even if every square foot of Iraqi real estate had not been scoured, interviews and investigations into the process that would create the capability for such weapons served lead him to his resolute conclusion that no such weapons were there.

Kay attributed the problem of flawed intelligence about the Iraqi capabilities to "limited data" rather than "inappropriate command influence" to cook the data.

Still, in political and public opinion arenas that go beyond Kay's purview, there is no accounting by mere intelligence flaws for the kind of specificity that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Powell and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld provided in making a public case for an unprovoked invasion. As was asserted by former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the Bush administration was "hell bent" to invade and occupy Iraq from the first day it occupied the White House, intelligence on WMDs or not.

How could Rumsfeld, for example, have said at least twice in March 2003, on the eve of the invasion, that "we know where Saddam Hussein is hiding biological and chemical weapons." He stressed, "We know exactly where they are."

It is hard to fathom that intelligence information allegedly that specific have been so completely wrong.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, speaking at yesterday's hearing cited other U.S. intelligence sources which conflicted, at the time, with administration claims of Iraqi WMD programs. He said the blame goes to the Bush administration officials who "misused the information provided."

"This is more than an intelligence failure, it is a manipulation of intelligence," he charged.

Sen. Levin put his finger on a specific case where the conflict between intelligence assessments and the assertions of Vice President Cheney were glaring, and it happened just in the last week.

He noted that Cheney said last Thursday, Jan. 22, that "mobile biological weapons labs were found in a couple of trailers" providing "conclusive evidence" that Hussein had WMDs.

But Kay testified yesterday that the trailers in question were, in fact, for producing hydrogen for weather balloons.

"We need to get to the bottom of this. If you are saying one thing, and Cheney another, we need to know from Mr. Cheney where he's getting his intelligence from," Sen. Levin pressed.

On this score, Kay was right to agree with Senate Democrats, over the fierce objection of Republicans, that an independent probe into the entire matter is called for.