Washington — ''We were all wrong'' — Iraq had no remaining arsenals of germ-warfare weapons, no poison gas or a nuclear-weapons program, the White House's former chief weapons sleuth said yesterday, a stunning indictment of U.S. and Western intelligence agencies that undermines President George W. Bush's original justification for ousting Saddam Hussein.
David Kay's calm but candid and sweeping repudiation before the U.S. Senate's armed-services committee will also fuel the political firestorm over whether Mr. Bush misled Americans and the rest of the world when he launched a pre-emptive attack against Iraq last spring. The White House's core claim at the time was that Mr. Hussein, armed with weapons of mass destruction, posed a real and imminent threat to the United States.
"It turns out we were all wrong," said Mr. Kay, a former United Nations weapons inspector and top Central Intelligence Agency adviser who led the postwar Iraq Survey Group's search for banned weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Kay, who included himself among those who were incorrect, quit last week after uncovering no stockpiles and finding that the Pentagon was shifting resources from his group.
In effect, Mr. Kay's testimony lends credence to Iraq's insistence before the UN last year that it no longer had stocks of germ-warfare weapons, poison gas or an active nuclear-weapons program.
Mr. Kay laid the blame on deeply flawed intelligence gathering, not only by the CIA but also by France, Germany and others who agreed with the assessment that Baghdad had failed to destroy its stocks of banned weapons and might still be producing them.
"That is most disturbing," Mr. Kay said, adding that the spies had been equally wrong in underestimating the scope of nuclear-weapons programs in Iran, North Korea and Libya.
Leading Democrats greeted Mr. Kay's revelations even more harshly.
Senator Edward Kennedy, one of the lone voices against the war when the U.S. Senate gave Mr. Bush overwhelming backing for the war, pointedly rejected Mr. Kay's assessment that even without stockpiles of banned weapons, Mr. Hussein posed a "gathering, serious threat."
"Gathering, serious threat . . . those were the words that justified us going into war?" Mr. Kennedy asked, echoing the words of leading Democrat presidential contenders, who have already been focusing on Mr. Bush's rationale for war as a key election issue.
Mr. Kay, who said there had been no political pressure to tone down his findings, told the committee he believes the world "is far safer with the disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein," although violence in Iraq itself continues. Yesterday, a suicide bomber killed three people and injured 17 others when he exploded a van disguised as an ambulance in front of a hotel frequented by Westerners.
But Mr. Kay argued the regime in North Korea is a more serious threat than pre-war Iraq.
"North Korea is an enigma, probably with nuclear weapons and long-range missiles," he said. "I would probably put it higher up on my scale of gathering threat. I think it's an existing threat." Mr. Bush has never voiced explicit willingness to launch a pre-emptive war against North Korea, although his doctrine specifically calls for rogue, terrorist-sponsoring states to be prevented from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Kay also suggested the full scope of Iraq's banned weapons programs may never be known and suggested that some stocks and documentation may have been secreted across the border to Syria.
"I would say probable," he said. "But my personal belief is that they did not move large stockpiles, because I do not believe they had reconstituted a capability that had produced large stockpiles."
He also suggested that a full-scale inquiry into what appears to have been a colossal intelligence failure may be needed.
"It is going to take an outside inquiry, both to do it and to give yourself and the American people the confidence that you have done it," he told the senators.
