US: The man who led the CIA's search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has become a central figure in a politically charged debate over President Bush's reasons for going to war against Iraq.
Mr David Kay, who resigned last week as head of the Iraq Survey Group, has called for an independent inquiry into pre-war intelligence about estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons, after his team failed to turn up any WMD or banned weapons programmes.
The White House, who originally assigned the task of finding weapons to Mr Kay, has rejected the call, saying that the CIA is conducting its own intelligence review and that the search for banned weapons continues. Under questioning by Republican Senator John McCain at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, Mr Kay said an outside inquiry should be held to establish why US intelligence failed and how it could be improved. "It turns out that we were all wrong, in my judgment," said Mr Kay, a former UN weapons inspector who, before the war, as a media commentator, regularly asserted that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons and was a threat to the US.
"It is important to acknowledge failure," he went on.
President Bush's National Security Adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, told ABC News yesterday, "We will want to allow the Iraq Survey Group to do its work. It will be important to have a comparison of what we found and what we thought we would find, when we have the evidence and the basis on which to do that."
White House officials have reportedly acknowledged privately that their pre-war claims about Iraq's weapons do not stand up and have directed the new leader of the Iraq Survey Group, Mr Charles Duelfer, to switch the emphasis from finding weapons to discovering how the weapons were disposed of.
Mr Kay's evidence to the Senate committee is a major blow for the Bush administration, which stated repeatedly and without qualification that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, and was a threat to American national security.
It raises the spectre for the White House of election-year criticisms that the president misled Americans about the reason for going into a war that has claimed the lives of more than 500 US soldiers. An outside inquiry would also focus on the role of CIA director Mr George Tenet, who is close to Mr Bush and who would be cross-examined about disparities between CIA intelligence and the public statements of administration officials.
It would also highlight the fact that last October the CIA suddenly dropped many qualification about its evidence of WMD in Iraq as the administration prepared for war and that top Bush officials "hardened" the evidence further.
At the Senate hearing the ranking Democrat, Mr Carl Levin, said, "When we decide to go to war, it is totally unacceptable to have intelligence that is this far off." Senator Levin accused the administration of making "numerous vivid, unqualified statements about Iraq having in its possession weapons of mass destruction - not programmes, not programme-related activities, not intentions".
Senator Edward Kennedy said many believed that what had happened "was more than a failure of intelligence; it was a result of the manipulation of the intelligence to justify a decision to go to war."
Under questioning by Democratic Senators, Mr Kay acknowledged he found no evidence that Iraq had chemical or biological stockpiles and acknowledged that UN inspections, discredited by the White House, achieved "quite a bit". He told Republicans, however, that Saddam Hussein had secret weapons development programmes and that the world was much safer since he was overthrown. He said he did not think intelligence analysts were pressurised to manipulate evidence to make the case for war. "You know, almost in a perverse way, I wish it had been undue influence because we know how to correct that," he said. "We were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here."
Dr Kay agreed that because Iraq was so large, there was a "theoretical possibility" that unconventional weapons might still turn up somewhere.
He added, however, "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 and biological weapons there."
In an indirect rebuke of Vice-President Dick Cheney, who repeated the administration's claim last week that two trailers found in Iraq provided "conclusive evidence" of "programmes for weapons of mass destruction", Mr Kay testified that "their actual intended use was not for the production of biological weapons."