NY TIMES - C.I.A. Had Only Very Little Data on Iraqi Arms, Ex-Inspector Says

This is a great article. Selected quotes below:
David A. Kay, who led the government's efforts to find evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs until he resigned on Friday, said the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did not realize that Iraqi scientists had presented ambitious but fanciful weapons programs to Mr. Hussein and had then used the money for other purposes.
Mr. Kay also reported that Iraq attempted to revive its efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2001 and 2002, but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya.
He said Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin until the American invasion last March. But in general, Mr. Kay said, the C.I.A. and other agencies failed to recognize that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Persian Gulf war, in 1991.
Mr. Kay said the fundamental errors in prewar intelligence assessments were so grave that he would recommend that the Central Intelligence Agency and other organizations overhaul their intelligence collection and analytical efforts.
Mr. Kay said analysts had come to him, "almost in tears, saying they felt so badly that we weren't finding what they had thought we were going to find — I have had analysts apologizing for reaching the conclusions that they did."
Regarding biological weapons, he said there was evidence that the Iraqis continued research and development "right up until the end" to improve their ability to produce ricin. "They were mostly researching better methods for weaponization," Mr. Kay said. "They were maintaining an infrastructure, but they didn't have large-scale production under way."
Mr. Kay said Iraq had also maintained an active ballistic missile program that was receiving significant foreign assistance right up until the start of the American invasion. He said it appeared that money was put back into the nuclear weapons program to restart the effort in part because the Iraqis realized they needed some kind of payload for their new rockets.
While he urged that the hunt should continue in Iraq, he said he believed "85 percent of the significant things" have already been uncovered, and cautioned that severe looting in Iraq after Mr. Hussein was toppled in April had led to the loss of many key documents and other materials. That means it will be virtually impossible to ever get a complete picture of what Iraq was up to before the war, he added.
He said Iraqi scientists and documents show that Baghdad was far more concerned about United Nations inspections than Washington had ever realized.
"The Iraqis say that they believed that Unscom was more effective, and they didn't want to get caught," Mr. Kay said, using an acronym for the inspection program, the United Nations Special Commission.
The Iraqis also feared the disclosures that would come from the 1995 defection of Hussein Kamel, Mr. Hussein's son-in-law, who had helped run the weapons programs. Mr. Kay said one Iraqi document that had been found showed the extent to which the Iraqis believed that Mr. Kamel's defection would hamper any efforts to continue weapons programs.
In addition, Mr. Kay said, it is now clear that an 1998 American bombing campaign against Iraq in 1998 destroyed much of the remaining infrastructure in chemical weapons programs.
The former Iraqi officers reported that no Special Republican Guard units had chemical or biological weapons, he said. But all of the officers believed that some other Special Republican Guard unit had chemical weapons.
"They all said they didn't have it, but they thought other units had it," Mr. Kay said. He said it appeared they were the victims of a disinformation campaign orchestrated by Mr. Hussein.
Mr. Kay said there was also no conclusive evidence that Iraq had moved any weapons of mass destruction to Syria, as some Bush administration officials have suggested. He said there had been persistent reports from Iraqis saying they or someone they knew had see cargo being moved across the border, but there is no proof that such movements involved weapons materials.
Mr. Kay said he was convinced that the analysts were not pressed by the Bush administration to make certain their prewar intelligence reports conformed to a White House agenda on Iraq.