David Kay: Condi Rice is an Incompetent Token

From Holden:

Kay testified before congress yesterday:

[David Kay] told Congress on Wednesday that the National Security Council led by Condoleezza Rice had botched intelligence information before the war and was “the dog that did not bark” over Iraq’s weapons program.

In uncharacteristically caustic remarks about his former colleagues, the weapons inspector, David Kay, said the National Security Council had failed to protect President Bush from faulty prewar intelligence and had left Secretary of State Colin L. Powell “hanging out in the wind” when he tried to gather intelligence before the war about Iraq’s weapons programs.

“Where was the N.S.C?” Dr. Kay asked, suggesting that the president had come to depend too heavily on information supplied by Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, and that the president needed to reach out to others for national security information.

“Every president who has been successful, at least that I know of, in the history of this republic, has developed both informal and formal means of getting checks on whether people who tell him things are in fact telling him the whole truth,” Dr. Kay told the Senate intelligence committee at a hearing called to discuss the findings of the Sept. 11 commission.

“I think this is particularly crucial and difficult to do in the intelligence area,” he continued. “The recent history has been a reliance on the N.S.C. system to do it. I quite frankly think that has not served this president very well.”

Dr. Kay added: “The dog that did not bark in the case of Iraq’s W.M.D. weapons program, quite frankly, in my view, is the National Security Council.”

[snip]

Dr. Kay did not identify Ms. Rice by name in his often-impassioned testimony. But his remarks were clearly aimed at her performance and reflected a widespread view among intelligence specialists that Ms. Rice, perhaps Mr. Bush’s most trusted aide, and the National Security Council have never been held sufficiently accountable for intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war.

[snip]

In his sharp attack on the National Security Council, Dr. Kay said that the council had failed, in particular, to provide Mr. Bush and Mr. Powell with the intelligence information they needed before the war about Iraq’s weapons capabilities, especially after both had expressed some skepticism about the extent of Iraq’s weapons programs.

“Where was the National Security Council when, apparently, the president expressed his own doubt about the adequacy of the case concerning Iraq’s W.M.D. weapons that was made before him?” Dr. Kay asked.

“Why was the secretary of state sent to the C.I.A. to personally vet the data that he was to take the Security Council in New York, and ultimately left to hang in the wind for data that was misleading and, in some cases, absolutely false and known by parts of the intelligence community to be false?” he continued. “Where was the N.S.C. then?”