May 6, 2004


Inspector says he warned U.S. officials of Iraqi prisoner abuse


By BOB GIBSON
Media General News Service


CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. -- David Kay, the man who led the U.S. search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, says he repeatedly told people about problems with the interrogation of prisoners, but the military ignored him.

"I was there and I kept saying the interrogation process is broken. The prison process is broken. And no one wanted to deal with it," Kay said. "It was too, too distasteful. This is a known problem, and the military refuses to deal with it."

Kay said in an interview Tuesday after speaking at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs that the abuse of Iraqi inmates at an American-run prison west of Baghdad is a disaster for the United States.

Anything less than severe action, which he described as a "hanging," against a two- or three-star general in charge means "in the Middle East, they are always going to believe we did it as part of a sanctioned process," Kay said.

"I am terribly worried that if we only charge the seven or 15 reservists who were involved and condemn the contractors who were involved and maybe the one-star reserve general who was in charge of this overall military prison unit, I think we will have done a horrible mistake," Kay said.

"Who's responsible for their behavior? Or are they scot-free?" Kay asked. He said that contract employees could be charged by a federal prosecutor with "violating a normative international law" but cannot be touched by the military that hired them because "the only sanction the military has against them is removal."

"I can't tell you how revolted I am," he said, yet Iraqis are far more revolted at the photos broadcast worldwide the past week showing U.S. soldiers smiling and giving thumbs-up signs while naked prisoners were forced to assume humiliating positions.

In his speech at the Miller Center, Kay defended the decision to go to war in Iraq even though no one has been able to find weapons of mass destruction, which had been the main reason given for going to war. Kay also said he never saw any evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida. terror network.

Kay, who previously worked in Iraq as the United Nations' chief nuclear weapons inspector, said that when American troops forced Iraq out of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq was "within six to 12 months of their first nuclear weapon."

Years after Iraq was defeated in the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein secretly decided in the mid-'90s to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, mostly chemical stockpiles, because they were too easy to find and could be rebuilt after world sanctions lapsed, Kay said.

Saddam kept up a policy of deception against weapons inspectors because he feared that the Iraqi people and his own army might overthrow him if they were not convinced he still had the weapons, Kay said. Every Iraqi general who has been interrogated was convinced the weapons were still in Iraq but had not seen them for years, he said.

American intelligence agencies remained fooled because Iraqis who wanted Saddam toppled kept feeding them false stories about his hidden stockpiles of chemical and other weapons, Kay said.

"They told us about weapons in order to get us to invade Iraq," he said. "They moved U.S. policy, and we didn't catch it."

The United States needs to massively rebuild human intelligence sources after too long a period of over-reliance on technology, Kay stressed. "As a nation, we've got to get serious about understanding the threats" and the conditions that build and foster terrorism, he said.

All the major western intelligence services were fooled about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction in the past three years, he said. "Around the world in the intelligence services, there was a shocking uniformity. ... Everyone was drinking from the same polluted pool and drawing the same wrong conclusions."

Bob Gibson is a staff writer for the Charlottesville Daily Progress.

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