Politics & Power Quote by David Kay

The careful stutter of caveats here is the point: David Kay is trying to move a live wire without getting shocked. “Not political,” “certainly not,” “not a witch hunt” - the repetition reads less like reassurance than a preemptive legal brief. He’s anticipating the two easiest ways power deflects criticism: by branding it partisan, or by reframing it as personal revenge. Kay’s insistence on intentions signals how contested the territory is; in high-stakes national security controversies, motives get litigated as aggressively as facts.

The phrase “since leaving” does quiet but crucial work. It marks him as newly unshackled, implying constraints he couldn’t name while inside the system. That temporal pivot also invites the reader to see his critique as earned rather than opportunistic: he’s speaking after the job, when the social and institutional penalties of dissent are steepest but the official levers are gone.

His real target appears in the technocratic-sounding “fundamental fault analysis.” It’s an engineering term smuggled into a political crisis, shifting blame from bad actors to bad methods: assumptions, incentives, analytic tradecraft, and the chain of custody from intelligence to policy. “Direct our attention” is soft language for a hard accusation: the public and press have been steered toward scapegoats and away from system design. Kay isn’t asking for a villain; he’s asking for an autopsy of how certainty gets manufactured.