Waiting for Mr Kay

OVER the past couple of months, the name David Kay has become something of a talisman for President George W Bush and his senior aides. Every time one of them is asked to explain why no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, Mr Kay’s name is invoked, sometimes along with his 1,200-member Iraq Survey Group, and the suggestion is made that he will provide all the answers. Mr Kay “will . . . over time produce the information that will respond to your question,” Secretary of Defence Donald H Rumsfeld said this month. “David Kay will find more evidence,” promised Vice President Cheney. Mr Bush himself told the United Nations on Tuesday that the Kay group would “reveal the full extent of (Iraq’s) weapons programmes and long campaign of deception.”

So when can we expect to hear from Mr Kay? There, it seems, is the catch. Asked this question at a briefing on Monday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice responded: “David Kay is not going to be done with this for quite some time. And I would not count on reports. I suppose there may be interim reports. I don’t know when those will be, and I don’t know what the public nature of them will be.” In other words, the Bush administration seems to be saying, any explanation of the missing weapons will come from Mr Kay — but don’t “count on reports.” This is an unacceptable dodge.
It’s not that Mr Kay is an inappropriate authority; he is a former senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq, and his team includes many highly qualified experts. Nor do we think it likely that Mr Kay has nothing to say, though if the stocks of chemical and biological arms the administration said were present in Iraq before the war had been found, we suspect the White House would have let the world know. In one of his few public statements since beginning his mission, Mr Kay told several reporters in Washington on July 31 that there had been “new discoveries every day.” His deputy, US Army Maj Gen Keith Dayton, said: “Every week, it is phenomenal what we are finding.”

More than seven weeks have passed since those statements, and Mr Kay, who gave a progress report to the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors the same day he spoke with reporters, had been expected to deliver a more substantial interim report this month. A White House official, expanding on Ms Rice’s remarks, says the report is not yet ready; when it is complete, he said, it will be delivered to CIA Director George Tenet, and the administration will then decide whether and how to publicise it. Congress is also expected to receive the report. Mr Kay has said he does not want to issue findings on “a piecemeal basis” or before he has compiled what he considers to be definitive proof. That’s not unreasonable from his point of view. But six months after US troops entered Iraq, President Bush owes the country an update about the threat he identified and what is now known about it. If Mr Kay is to be delegated to deliver that answer, then he should make his interim report not just to Mr Tenet and Congress but in public.