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The anti-war crowd has been trying to twist David Kay's resignation and "exit interviews" with the media into a refutation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

David Kay's actual beliefs, however, do not support that allegation. In the past Kay has issued rebukes of sloppy press reports about his work. Apparently the liberal media is up to its old tricks again.

First, a little history will help set the stage. Kay stated in a January 19th, 2003 article in the Washington Post:

When it comes to the U.N. weapons inspection in Iraq, looking for a smoking gun is a fool's mission. That was true 11 years ago when I led the inspections there. It is no less true today—even after the seemingly important discovery on Thursday of a dozen empty short-range missile warheads left over from the 1980s.

The only job the inspectors can expect to accomplish is confirming whether Iraq has voluntarily disarmed. That is not a task that need take months more. And last week's cache is irrelevant in answering that question, regardless of the U.N.'s final determination. That's because the answer is already clear: Iraqi is in breach of U.N. demands that it dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.

His interim report from late last year also repeated the facts of Saddam's duplicity, as reported in The Telegraph:

The former UN inspector said that Iraq had civilian technology that could have been swiftly converted to weapons programmes. He also said Saddam pursued an elaborate programme of deception to trick inspectors in the countdown to the war.

And from that interim report, a list of what Kay had already discovered, part of which reads:

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002.

• A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.
• In addition to the discovery of extensive concealment efforts, we have been faced with a systematic sanitization of documentary and computer evidence in a wide range of offices, laboratories, and companies suspected of WMD work. The pattern of these efforts to erase evidence—hard drives destroyed, specific files burned, equipment cleaned of all traces of use—are ones of deliberate, rather than random, acts.
• Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.
• New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.
• Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

In October, the month he presented his interim report, Kay said on Fox News Sunday (October 5th):

Well, we have found right now—and we're still finding them—over two dozen laboratories that were hidden in the Iraqi intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, were not declared to the U.N., had prohibited equipment, and carried on activities that should have been declared.

Now, at the minimum, they kept alive Iraq's capability to produce both biological and chemical weapons. We found assassination tools. So we know that, in fact, they had a prohibited intent to them.

And recently in an article from Associated Press:

Since Kay's resignation Friday as the top U.S. weapons investigator in Iraq, Kay has said Iraq had no large-scale weapons production program during the 1990s, after it lost the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and no large numbers of mass destruction weapons were available for "imminent action."

Still, "that is not the same thing as saying it was not a serious, imminent threat," he said Sunday. "That is a political judgment," he said, "not a technical judgment."

...

"I must say I actually think Iraq—what we learned during the inspections—made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war," Kay added.

In an article in The Telegraph, Kay was quoted as saying this about WMD possibly being shipped to Syria:

We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved.

So there you have it, what Kay actually believes instead of what the anti-war crowd wants to think he believes. It is a well-known trick of propagandists to cite many "sources" and then claim their articles are "richly sourced" or "fully cited" as if linking to a source validates their opinion of what the source actually said. Providing citations is meaningless when you lie about what those sources actually say.

Iraqi is in breach of U.N. demands that it dismantle its weapons of mass destruction.

So we know that, in fact, they had a prohibited intent to them.

I must say I actually think Iraq—what we learned during the inspections—made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war.

...we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war...