Weapons inspector fears ISIS could gain control of WMDs

David Kay, the lead weapons inspector in the months after U.S. forces invaded and toppled Saddam Hussein, told the Washington Examiner the country is likely still littered with chemical weapons dating from the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.

In an interview, Kay also said neither President Bush nor President Obama made it a priority to locate and destroy the weapons of mass destruction, leaving them open to use by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

“ISIS has proven, as has [Syrian President Bashar] Assad, they will use anything that is available, and they have no compulsion about using chemical agents,” Kay said, noting that the terrorist group benefits from “having a group of volunteers who will blow themselves up.”

Kay, who was also the United Nations chief weapons inspector from 1991 to 1992 and is now a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute, says the chemical munitions are so old and degraded that they probably pose the most danger to anyone who tries to move them.

“They would use these if they could find them. I have no doubt that they would, but it would probably be more harmful to the terrorists that anyone else around,” he added.

Reports about chemical weapons use by terrorists on Iraqi troops has so far focused on the likelihood that they have used chlorine gas, which is easily obtainable and induces dizziness and vomiting but is rarely lethal.

Kay warns, however, that the Islamic State’s use of remnant sarin and mustard gas is a real concern.

“If you’re willing to lop a head off of hostage that came there to help provide humanitarian assistance, you would do anything,” he said.

Because the munitions have deteriorated over two and a half decades, they would not have the full impact of operational WMDs, he said.

Still, if the Islamic State tried to use the old warheads and shells loaded with sarin and mustard gas, it “could have deadly consequences for a limited amount of people.”

The White House stressed that it takes the possibility of ISIS acquiring chemical weapons “very seriously” and said the international community has “worked diligently” in Iraq and Syria to round up and destroy them.

“We continue to monitor closely any indications of [ISIS] chemical weapons interest, intent and capabilities, and take this very seriously,” National Security Council spokesman Alistair Baskey told the Examiner on Tuesday. “We do not judge that [ISIS] currently has the capability to produce sophisticated chemical weapons. Proliferation by non-state actors is a significant reason why in Iraq, and now Syria, the international community has worked diligently to eliminate all components of a chemical weapons program.”

Iraqi authorities believe the Islamic State is in control the Muthanna State Establishment, a critical chemical weapons production facility during the Hussein era. The Times reported that some 2,500 chemical-filled rockets are said to be in the facility, but it was never encased in concrete despite a Iraqi government plan to do so.

After the Times report, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby expressed confidence that ISIS is not “in possession of those kinds of munitions,” and said it would be “very, very difficult for them to weaponize” the degraded munitions.

Kay was responding to a New York Times article this month that accused the Bush administration of covering up nearly a decade of exposure among US troops to some 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or bombs that are thought to remain in Iraq.

Kay said the Times’ article was “overblown” because it didn’t stress that the weapons are degraded. There is evidence that Saddam tried and failed in the mid-to-late 1990s to make roadside bombs from the corroded weapons, he added.

The NYT article, however, provided vivid detail about how U.S. troops repeatedly came across chemical weapons and that they and Iraqi troops were harmed by them on at least six occasions. It detailed how Washington concealed information about the old weapons from the troops deployed to Iraq and from military doctors.

Following the report, former Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., who chaired the House Intelligence Committee in the years after the Iraq invasion, and former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., accused top Bush administration officials, including Karl Rove, of thwarting their congressional investigations into the remnant WMDs in the early years of the war.

Hoesktra and Santorum say the seeds of the problem were planted during the first years of the Iraq war when the Bush administration and CIA concealed information about the extent of Hussein’s older chemical stockpile and information about soldiers’ reports of exposure to WMDs. They say they were stunned by the stonewalling, arguing that it violated constitutional congressional oversight of the executive branch.

“Not only did they find it and didn’t tell anybody, but the other thing is that they didn’t even deal with it,” in many cases, Hoesktra told the Examiner. “There’s a lot of fears that this stuff is still out there and was never removed or destroyed and that now ISIS may have it.”

“The significance of the story is the size and the scope of the number of chemical warheads and shells that likely remain in Iraq and how effective the [Bush administration] was in keeping this stuff under wraps for seven or eight years. … That’s what is just mind-boggling to me,” he said.

Hoekstra, while intelligence panel chairman, said he traveled to Iraq 10 times to investigate reports of WMD discoveries and held hearings into the matter.

The Bush administration and the CIA “always discounted” the information they gathered, he said.

Hoesktra also says he had a personal conversation with Bush in 2006 about evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq.

Hoekstra says that during this private one-on-one discussion, he told Bush he was sitting on a “potential treasure trove of information that may shed light on WMDs.”

The president at first seemed very interested and encouraged him to pursue his investigation, Hoesktra says. “His reaction was ‘Wow, that’s something we ought to be really taking a look at,’ ” the former lawmaker said.

But nobody from the White House, not even security adviser Stephen Hadley, ever got back to him about his inquiries or findings.

“There was zero follow-up and zero feedback and zero movement on it,” Hoekstra said.

After the 2003 invasion and Saddam’s ouster, finding WMDs was not a priority for the Bush administration, Pentagon or the CIA, Hoekstra says.

“WMD was not a priority,” he said, “except whatever you find and whatever you learn, make sure you don’t share it with Congress.”

Hiding evidence of any type of chemical weapon, operational or not, is not optional for any administration, Hoesktra argued.

“It’s not like the president and his staff can wake up in the morning and say, ‘Congress is asking about WMDs. Are we going to give them the information or not?’ ”

“You don’t like to think about it, but it appears to me there was a concerted effort to hide information and lie to Congress — a full-fledged effort,” he said.

Key figures in the Bush administration, including Rove and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, wanted to move past the WMD debate because inspectors failed to find operational stockpiles that were Bush’s main stated justification for invading Iraq, several sources say.

But the sources also say Rove’s and others’ lack of interest in trying to collect and destroy old chemical weapons was far more nuanced than is suggested by the New York Times article and subsequent accounts in the press.

Rather than an “evil plan” by Rove and others, sources say Bush administration officials wanted to move on once inspectors couldn’t find the mobile laboratories that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell detailed in his pivotal speech at the U.N. Security Council that made the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

There were many dissenters in the CIA who never supported the argument that Saddam had an active WMD program, several sources said, and Bush officials knew that any attempt to discuss chemical weapons in Iraq that fell short of the Powell speech would be ridiculed.

“What this comes down to is whether or not the CIA was concealing information from the oversight committee,” said a knowledgeable former Capitol Hill staffer. “They will say they were not concealing information, they were obfuscating, and that’s what they always do.

“This is a complete Casablanca moment; I’m shocked, shocked that politics is going on here.This is par for the course. … This is how the intelligence community works.”

“That’s the way it’s been for years – that’s the way it is,” the source said. “If Congress is worth it’s salt, then they fight it harder. And if they aren’t, they don’t.”

Sources said the number of remnant chemical munitions in Iraq wasn’t a secret. Many people in Congress and the administration knew about them but didn’t dwell on them because they drew attention to, but did not fulfill, the main justification for the invasion — that Saddam had an operational chemical stockpile.

In 2006, the year Santorum lost re-election, he argued that Bush was losing the public-relations battle over the war on terror and Iraq and should have highlighted the old chemical weapons discoveries and made them secure to avoid harm to US troops.

He remembers Bush administration officials saying, “This stuff wasn’t that big of a deal, there’s not much of it, it’s degraded.”

Santorum says he tried to remind officials and the press that part of the case for invasion was that Saddam had not accounted for the chemical stockpile he had built in the 1980s.

Bush and Rice did not return requests for comment. A spokesman for Rove said he was traveling and could not be reached. Hadley’s spokesperson declined to comment.

Hoekstra recalls speaking to Kay, the head of the CIA-appointed Iraq Survey Group searching for WMDs. Before the war, Kay predicted that Saddam was maintaining operational stockpiles, and he resigned in January of 2004 after failing to find them.

During his conversations with Hoekstra shortly after the 2003 invasion, Kay said there weren’t enough troops in Iraq to allow him to pursue leads about remnant WMDs.

“He said, ‘Pete, there’s so much going on there but whenever I get a tip. … I just don’t have the troops to protect the team and go out and investigate,’ ” Hoesktra recalled, adding, “The Iraq Survey Group wasn’t getting the support they needed.”

In an interview with the Examiner, Kay confirmed the conversations with Hoekstra.

He said the lack of troops and a growing Sunni insurgency prevented him from being able to look for the older chemical stockpiles.

“I didn’t have the troops to protect our people as we looked for these older weapons,” he said.

“We knew about them and we ran across them, and we got rid of some of them,” he said. “But we did not have the number of personnel to source the country at that same time there was an insurgency going on — we needed the protection to do it.”

“It just wasn’t a high priority. There was a raging insurgency going on and nobody wanted to make the troops available. The high priority was establishing that there wasn’t WMD leading up to the war.”

Kay lays the blame for the troop shortage on then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s shoulders. He recalls how then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki was fired in the lead-up to the war after telling the Senate Armed Services Committee that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed in Iraq when taking into account the ability to secure the country.

Kay says Shinseki was fired because he “spoke truthfully about the amount of troops” needed to take Baghdad and hold the country together.

More troops would have helped secure known weapons facilities, Iraq’s Finance Ministry and museums full of sacred and priceless artifacts, as well as the country’s electronic power production, which still has problems because of early looting, Kay said.

In June 2006, after spending more than two years trying to persuade the Bush administration and the CIA to engage on the issue, Hoesktra and Santorum had a press conference touting a Pentagon report that found 500 chemical weapon shells in Iraq.

After the press conference, the Bush administration and Pentagon officials, including Kay, said the older weapons weren’t the ones that the administration was really interested in finding.

Kay, at the time, said the sarin warheads Hoekstra and Santorum publicized in 2006 were “less toxic than most things that Americans have under their kitchen sink.”

Now Kay is far more circumspect about the danger the weapons posed and continue to pose after the Times’ early October report.

“You can’t say what you don’t know and what you didn’t see,” he said about the weapons. “Most of the chemical weapons that I knew of that were manufactured before 1991were leaky, damaged, corroded weapons.”

He recalled how one bunker identified as a “main chemical weapons site” was “just too dangerous to try to dispose of.”

He believes the remnant weapons should really be characterized as “hazardous materials” instead of operational chemical agents.

Kay laments that even after the 2007 and 2008 surge, when security was re-established in Iraq, the Bush administration did not make finding and destroying remnant WMDs a priority.

“What is disappointing is that once U.S. forces got control back in 2008, there was this other element that people ignored,” he said.

The Obama administration shares that blame, he says, because they were so “determined to get out of Iraq, come hell or high water and faster than circumstances demanded” that they did not make cleaning up the old chemical weapons mess a priority either.