The sense that the media are behaving like Stalin's stooges in simply ignoring inconvenient truths deepens today with further coverage of David Kay's remarks last weekend. As I have previously noted, Kay said he now believed there had been no large scale WMD programme in Iraq but that Saddam was continuing to try to develop weaponised ricin right up to the war last year, and that he had restarted a rudimentary nuclear programme. Nevertheless, today's news pages simply ignored this and gave the impression instead that Kay had said there had been no WMD since 1991, period.

Thus the Guardian states:

'Further damage to Downing Street's case for going to war came from Dr Kay, who said yesterday that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had failed to recognise that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Gulf war.'

The Times foreign page simply reports Kay's observations about the corruption and falsification of Saddam's weapons programmes. Meanwhile foreign editor Bronwen Maddox suggests that the Bush administration had come close to misrepresenting Kay's work to give false backing to its claim that Saddam did have WMD:

'“The Kay report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction- related programme activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the UN,” the President said. Strictly, that is true, but it misrepresents the tone of Kay’s preliminary report, which was sceptical of the existance of large-scale programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction. It was hard to discern much that was favourable to the Administration in its pages. That is even more true of Kay’s final report, which expresses doubt that there was any sustained illicit effort, on a large scale, after 1991.'

But actually, Kay's interim report said he had found evidence of a clandestine network of biological programmes which had been concealed from all the weapons inspectors and was still being concealed after the war had started. This is consistent with what he has now said, which suggests that while chemical programmes may not have existed (and we don't know that for sure either) biological and nuclear ones certainly did. So why are these journalists all strenuously suggesting that Kay meant something that is demonstrably at odds with what he actually said?

The only print journalist to note what Kay actually said about ricin and nukes was the admirable Michael Gove in the Times:

'In the first instance it is just not true to assert that Saddam had abandoned efforts to acquire biological and nuclear weapons, even after years of sanctions and inspections. According to David Kay, Iraq was “researching better methods” of weaponising the deadly poison, ricin, “right up until the end”. And Saddam did make an effort to restart his nuclear weapons programe in 2000 and 2001. Western intelligence agencies may have miscalculated the precise nature of Saddam’s WMD arsenal, but they were right to conclude that the Iraqi dictator remained an active player in the mass-murder marketplace.'

Quite so.

Posted by melanie at January 27, 2004