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Bush should 'come clean'
03/03/2004 07:55 - (SA)
London - The former chief of the group of experts responsible for finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, David Kay, told a British newspaper on Wednesday that US President George W Bush should "come clean" and admit that he was mistaken about Iraq's weapons arsenal.
"It's about confronting and coming clean with the American people, not just slipping a phrase into the state of the union speech," Kay told the Guardian in an interview in Washington.
"I was convinced and still am convinced that there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction at the time of the war," he said.
"There were continuing clandestine activities but increasingly driven more by corruption than driven by purposeful directed weapons programmes."
Kay resigned in January and has blamed intelligence failures, not political leaders, for the much-publicised accusations that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons and sought nuclear arms -- the core of Bush's case for war.
To regain trust
Despite clearly admiring Bush and believing he went to war in Iraq in good faith, according to the Guardian, Kay thinks the president has to go further to regain public trust.
"He (Bush) should say: 'We were misunderstood and I am determined to find out why,'" he said.
"When you don't say you got it wrong, it leads to the general belief that you manipulated the intelligence and so you did it for some other purpose.
"I think we lost the credibility of our intelligence. The next time you have to go and shout there's fire in the theatre people are going to doubt it," Kay said.
The former head of the Iraq Survey Group, the team searching for weapons which continues to comb the country, shocked the Senate on January 28 by saying they had almost all been "wrong" on Iraqi weapons.
Subsequently London and Washington have announced inquiries into the quality of the intelligence used by the governments to justify the decision to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein.
- AFP
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