KAY CONFUSION
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James Joyner | Saturday, January 24, 2004 |
Black-5 passes on this Dow Jones report:
David Kay, the outgoing leader of a U.S. weapons search team in Iraq, says that part of Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program was hidden in Syria, a published report said Sunday.Kay reportedly told The Sunday Telegraph that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials were moved to Syria shortly before last year’s war to overthrow Saddam.
“We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons but we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam’s WMD (weapons of mass destruction) program,” Kay reportedly said in the interview conducted Saturday.
This would seem to verify a DEBKA story that I posted–skeptically–on January 9.
Which makes Kay’s widely-reported denial of Iraqi WMD stockpiles really confusing:
Though Kay has said new information has been uncovered about Iraq’s programs — particularly its efforts to build missiles — he has since concluded there are no weapons stockpiles to be found.“I don’t think they existed,” Kay told Reuters news agency on Friday. “What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the [1991] gulf war, and I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the ’90s.”
Kay, supported by the coalition’s Iraq Survey Group, went to Iraq in the wake of the war to lead the search for evidence of WMDs.
Given how the statement was obviously going to play in the press and the campaign trail, why not mention them both simultaneously? They’re rather connected.
Update (2251): The Telegraph story.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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What's more interesting to me is that I am watching all of the cable news networks at 8PM CST, and ALL of them are only discussing the lack of WMD found - not the Syria issue.
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