David Kay, WMD, and the media

Since the chief Coalition WMD hunter David Kay resigned last week, there's been a flurry of activity in the press, mostly casting aspersions on the Administration (and implicitly advancing the “Bush lied!” meme).

I was hoping to find the time to write something on the subject, but now I don't have to: Bryan Preston of Junkyard Blog has it covered. (via Instapundit.)

Now, how do we square Kay's comments here with his comments to Coughlin stating that Iraq probably shipped some banned weapons to Syria? How can Saddam ship weapons that do not exist? I don't know, but it seems to me that in these stories there is a glaring conflict—either the weapons existed or they didn't. Kay says in one story that they did exist and are probably in Syria; in another, he says they didn't exist at all. The next reporter to interview him should try and reconcile these conflicting stories, which are coming from the same weapons hunter. …

The Lindlaw piece then moves to a quote from Sen. Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressing surprise that “no semblance of weapons has been found”—even though Kay's initial report stated that more than a semblance of weapons was in fact found. Kay's report indicated a weapons program, though likely dormant, did exist. Kay's report highlighted the discovery of a small amount of botulinim, the most toxic substance on earth, in the refrigerator of an Iraqi WMD scientist. What Kay's report did not show is what happened to the large stockpiles of other WMDs that Saddam was known to have possessed before the first Gulf War, and which seem to have disappeared either in the mid 90s or in the run up to last year's invasion. We still have no evidence for what happened to those weapons, which everyone from Hans Blix to Jacques Chirac to John Kerry and George W. Bush agreed existed prior to the war. That's what we need to find out. And that's the one thing that Kay says in both the Coughlin and Lindlaw stories—we need to find out what happened to those weapons, because Saddam never offered proof that he had destroyed them.

Preston also takes John Kerry to task, and rightly so: Wesley Clark might be catching grief for hinting that President Bush was a “deserter,” but Kerry's accusations are arguably more serious. And just as unfounded.

Meanwhile, Wretchard of The Belmont Club gives a very grim assessment of the state of WMD proliferation. I pray that he's wrong—but even if the situation now isn't as bad as he describes, in a few years it may well be.

UPDATE: More here, from Justin Katz.