Wasn't resolution 1441 passed like 14 yrs ago?
Posted on 01/28/2004 5:47:41 PM PST by tallhappy
Transcript of Hillary Clinton's Q&A with David Kay in today's Senate Hearing chaired by John Warner,.
SEN. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON (D), NEW YORK: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And Dr. Kay, I join with my colleagues in thanking you for your public service. And it's with great admiration that I have followed your service over a number of years, and I thank you greatly.
I just wanted to clarify a few other comments that have been reported in the press just to get the record clear in my own mind. There were some references to your decision to leave the effort due to the failure to have the full complement of analysts, translators, interrogators and others to work with you.
And I know that that was a concern that had been expressed to this committee and others because of the movement of people out of the group into counterinsurgency efforts.
CLINTON: Was that a factor in either impacting the quality and substance of the search or your decision to step down?
KAY: Senator Clinton, there were two factors that led me to decide it was the appropriate time to return to private life. When I agreed to take on this job, I had only two conditions. As you know well, when you negotiate with the federal government, salary is not one of the things you can negotiate back.
I said there were two things that were important to me. One is that the instrument we were going to use, the Iraqi Survey Group, be totally focused on elimination of WMD as long as we carried out that mission.
That was based on two facts.
One, my experience with the federal government is that when you have multiple masters and multiple tasks, you get the typical interagency mush and you don't get directive action, and I didn't think we had the time to do that.
The second was -- and I told George Tenet directly this -- by undertaking this task from the president of investigating and trying to determine reality compared to your estimates, you are going to run a moral hazard -- the moral hazard of self investigation. And that the only way I was willing to be a party to that is that I had the independence to choose the instrument that was going to be doing it and I had the resources that were necessary to do it. And that was agreed.
By September, I was in the process of running battles both with the DOD and with the intelligence community that wanted to redirect resources and the activities of the ISG to the looming political insecurity crisis that was Baghdad.
I perfectly understood the difficulty we were having. I lived there. I knew how hazardous it was. I just thought the ISG and those resources were inappropriate for it.
By November, I had lost that battle. The decision had been made to give ISG parallel priorities in addition to WMD, and resources were being halved off. And at that point, I did what I had said in June when I took the job: I'm simply not prepared to run that moral hazard for myself or for someone else under those conditions.
KAY: No big surprise and no anger on my part. You know, it was clear going on, it's actually in writing, on those two points when the administration felt that it couldn't live up to that any longer because of the security situation, which I fully understood. I thought it best to let someone else who I have great respect for and has capabilities -- I think he can do it -- take on the job.
CLINTON: Well, Dr. Kay, I appreciate your explanation.
But it raises two additional questions, at least in my mind, that -- we have addressed one before and that is whether we had enough resources on the ground to begin with. Making this Hobson's choice as to whether to continue with the full complement of resources and personnel you required and were agreed to be given to you to pursue this important task or having to divert because we didn't have enough resources on the ground to do the other job illustrates clearly the confusion at the very center of this whole enterprise post-military action.
But it raises an additional concern to me, which is that this wasn't a priority. You know, if you have a real priority, you figure out how to meet that priority.
And I think that the administration's decision to divert resources and personnel speaks volumes about what they really thought was at stake. I think by, certainly, November, if not by September, the fact that so much of the documentary evidence had been destroyed in the looting; the preliminary reports that you provided the Congress -- the administration prestaged what has become the final conclusion you've reached -- that we were not going to find such evidence of weapons of mass destruction, certainly raises for me serious questions about the real intention of the administration to begin with.
Secondly, I'm very interested in what you have concluded about the Iraqi decisions to abandon production of WMD because of the U.N. inspection process, that during the 1990s, in fact, the international community's effort to discover and destroy Saddam's weapons was working. Is that a fair statement of your findings?
KAY: It's compressed, but fair. And I must say, I had, as you know, because you were there, I had a number of former U.N. inspectors working for me. We often sat around and said that, you know, it turned out we were better than we thought we were in terms of the Iraqis feared that we had capabilities and although they took tremendous steps to try to compromise us and to lie, in fact, the U.N. inspection process achieved quite a bit.
CLINTON: And of course, my time has expired, but I think that rightly does raise questions that we should be examining about whether or not the U.N. inspection process pursuant to 1441 might not also have worked without the loss of life that we have confronted both among our own young men and women, as well as Iraqis.
KAY: Well, Senator Clinton, let me just add to that.
We have had a number of Iraqis who have come forward and said, "We did not tell the U.N. about what we were hiding, nor would we have told the U.N. because we would run the risk of our own" -- I think we have learned things that no U.N. inspector would have ever learned given the terror regime of Saddam and the tremendous personal consequences that scientists had to run by speaking the truth.
That's not to say, and it's not incompatible with the fact that inspections accomplish a great deal in holding a program down. And that's where the surprise is.
In holding the program down, in keeping it from break out, I think the record is better than we would have anticipated. I don't think the record is necessarily better than we thought with regard to getting the final truth, because of the power of the terrorist state that Saddam Hussein had.
CLINTON: Thank you.
-PJ
Just ask the FJB..
Wasn't resolution 1441 passed like 14 yrs ago?
"If only we could have waited another 250 years I'm sure Iraq would have complied."
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