"It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information," said Kay, who resigned Friday. Asked whether President Bush owed the nation an explanation for the gap between his warnings and Kay's findings, Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people."
The CIA would not comment yesterday on Kay's remarks, although one intelligence official pointed out that Kay himself had predicted last year that his search would turn up banned weapons.
Kay said his predictions were not "coming back to haunt me in the sense that I am embarrassed. They are coming back to haunt me in the sense of `Why could we all be so wrong?' "
The White House stuck by its assertions that illicit weapons will be found in Iraq but had no additional response yesterday to Kay's remarks.
Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said Kay's comments reinforced his belief that the Bush administration had exaggerated the threat Iraq posed. "It confirms what I have said for a long period of time, that we were misled -- misled not only in the intelligence, but misled in the way that the president took us to war," Kerry, a presidential candidate, said on "FOX News Sunday." "I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception."
Senator Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was surprised Kay "did not find some semblance of WMD" in Iraq. Roberts said a report on Iraq intelligence, to be delivered to his panel Wednesday, should help clarify the CIA's prewar performance. "It appears now that that intelligence -- there's a lot of questions about it," Roberts said on CNN's "Late Edition."
In October 2002, Bush said Iraq had "a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions." In his address two days before launching the invasion, Bush said US troops would enter Iraq "to eliminate weapons of mass destruction."
