Declaring that "we were all wrong," former chief weapons hunter David Kay called Wednesday for a fundamental analysis of how the US intelligence community erred in concluding that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Kay disputed the notion that US intelligence analysts reached the conclusions they did because of political pressure, telling members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the reason for the intelligence failure went deeper.
"It turns out we were all wrong, probably, in my judgement. And that is most disturbing," he said.
Kay, who resigned last week after six months at the head of the Iraq Survey Group, appeared before the committee after disclosing publicly that in his judgement that Iraq had no recently produced weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded the country last year.
Kay said the ISG's investigation should continue and acknowledged "the theoretical possibility" that hidden weapons might yet be found, but he said that in the end there would likely remain "unresolvable ambiguity" about Iraq's weapons programs.
"I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense that it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarised chemical weapons there," he said.
Kay was questioned sharply by senators on both sides of the aisle, with Republicans stressing that the investigation was incomplete and Democrats trying to draw out Kay with questions about the intelligence that supported the administration's pre-war assertions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
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