You’ve probably heard that former weapons inspector David Kay doesn’t think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But here’s what else he thinks:
“We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here,” he said. “My view was that the best evidence I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.” … Mr. Kay said he doesn’t think members of the administration pressured analysts to shape evidence to make the case for war. “I deeply think that is the wrong explanation,” Mr. Kay said, adding that numerous analysts had come to him in recent months to apologize about incorrect estimates. [NYSun, Jan 29, 2004]
Kay testified before the Senate Armed Services committee:
In the course of doing that, I had innumerable [intelligence] analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance. And never–not in a single case–was the explanation, “I was pressured to do this.” The explanation was very often, “The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there’s another explanation for it.” [CNN, Jan 28, 2004]
James Taranto adds:
Earlier in the week a New York Times editor “sexed up” the paper’s coverage of Kay, leading the paper to publish this embarrassing correction Tuesday:
Because of an editing error, a front-page article yesterday about David A. Kay, the C.I.A.’s former weapons inspector, misstated his view of whether the agency’s analysts had been pressured by the Bush administration to tailor their prewar intelligence reports about Iraq’s weapons programs to conform to a White House political agenda. Mr. Kay said he believed that there was no such pressure, not that there was. (His view was correctly reflected in a quotation that followed the error.)