Emperors, clothes, and David Kay on intelligence

I read and re-read James Risen’s interview with David Kay in the NYT today. Kay comes across as a thoughtful person, no patsy by any means; someone who seems prepared to call it like he sees it, and who is still sincerely struggling to understand how the US intelligence “community” could have gotten it all so terribly wrong about Saddam’s WMDs.
To me, the most interesting part of the interview was not Kay’s assessment–based on debriefing of Tarek Aziz and other Saddam-regime detainees–that for the last few years of his time in power Saddam was effectively delusional, and indeed majorly deluded by people who came to him with cock-a-mamie schemes for weapons programs that could never work.
(Hey, the folks in Washington wouldn’t know anything about any of those, I’m sure… )
No, the most interesting part is where Kay is reflecting on the effects of a kind of group-think inside the US intelligence agencies. It comes right at the end of Risen’s interview:

While [Kay] said the [CIA] analysts who were monitoring Iraq’s weapons programs did the best they could with what they had, he argued that the agency failed to make it clear to American policy makers that their assessments were increasingly based on very limited information.
“I think that the system should have a way for an analyst to say, `I don’t have enough information to make a judgment,’ ” Dr. Kay said. “There is really not a way to do that under the current system.”
He added that while the analysts included caveats on their reports, those passages “tended to drop off as the reports would go up the food chain” inside the government.
As a result, virtually everyone in the United States intelligence community during both the Clinton and the current Bush administrations thought Iraq still had the illicit weapons, he said. And the government became a victim of its own certainty.
“Alarm bells should have gone off when everyone believes the same thing,” Dr. Kay said. “No one stood up and said, `Let’s examine the footings for these conclusions.’ I think you ought to have a place for contrarian views in the system.”

Kay assured Risen that he did not feel that CIA analysts had felt pressured by their political bosses to skew their findings any partiocular way. Risen made no mention of the DIA people or retired CIA people like these ones who have reported having experienced such political pressures. But even without the palpable effect of such pressures, Kay was evidently worried about the effect of the group-think, reveal-no-uncertainty culture that had taken root in the CIA.
Kay told Risen that Iraq,

attempted to revive its efforts to develop nuclear weapons in 2000 and 2001, but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya did.
He said Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin until the American invasion last March. But in general, Dr. 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. [Emphasis by HC]

One of the reasons all the US intel agencies had gotten got it all so terribly wrong in the years leading up to last March was, basically, because Washington DC was not the only national capital where officials were telling their increasingly delusional bosses what they wanted to hear… That was also happening– happening, indeed, on a far bigger scale than in Washington– in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.
Kay said he and his team had learned that:

sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a “vortex of corruption,” when government activities began to spin out of control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-riven Saddam Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from others.
After the onset of this “dark ages,” Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state.

Gosh, don’t you hate it when that happens?
Actually, it was even worse than that. One of the most hilarious tidbits Kay’s people learned from former deputy Iraqi PM Tarek Aziz was that, “Mr. Hussein would send Mr. Aziz manuscripts of novels he was writing, even as the American-led coalition was gearing up for war.”
Gosh, what is it with these crazy dictators? I remember once when someone asked me if I’d like to be the English-language literary agent for a work of fiction that a wellknown Middle Eastern ruler had written… My answer? No.
Anyway, I’m tired. I just want to end up here with David Kay’s bottom line there, from the NYT story:

“I’m personally convinced that there were not large stockpiles of newly produced weapons of mass destruction,” Dr. Kay said. “We don’t find the people, the documents or the physical plants that you would expect to find if the production was going on.

By the way, if you want to see what I was writing here in JWN about the Niger-yellowcake forgery back in March and Junewho it was that had been responsible for planting such a potentially provocative story and thus leading the whole world astray…
We have yet to see such an enquiry materialize here in the US. Maybe the Valerie Plame enquiry could evolve into a bigger investigation of this sort here, in the same way the David Kelly enquiry led to much broader revelations about the general intel-skewing process in Britain. But it hasn’t happened here yet.
In Britain, meanwhile, the count-down has now begun to the Hutton Inquiry’s delivery of its final report, due Wednesday…