"Sen. Edward Kennedy knows very directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction"
About this Quote
The sentence performs a careful two-step: it borrows the authority of a famous skeptic, then uses that borrowed authority to launder a now-discredited claim. By invoking Sen. Edward Kennedy as someone who "knows very directly", David Kay isn’t really trying to inform the reader about a private conversation. He’s trying to inoculate himself against the charge that the pro-war WMD case was a partisan sales job. If even Ted Kennedy heard this, the implication goes, then the intelligence must have looked compelling to serious people across the aisle.
It’s also a subtle act of reputation management. Kay doesn’t say "I was wrong" or "the evidence was flawed". He says "the best evidence that I had seen" and "my view was", insulating the statement inside the boundaries of what felt reasonable at the time. That phrasing shifts accountability from judgment to information flow: the problem becomes what was available to be seen, not the decision to interpret it aggressively.
Context sharpens the intent. Kay led the Iraq Survey Group in 2003-04 and ultimately reported that Iraq did not possess stockpiled WMDs. After that, his public role was partly explanatory, partly defensive: how did smart institutions, experts, and lawmakers converge on a false certainty? The Kennedy reference is doing political work in that narrative, signaling that elite consensus existed before the invasion.
The line’s quiet cynicism is that it asks the listener to focus on who was briefed, not on what was true. It treats proximity to power as a proxy for credibility, when the Iraq WMD saga proved the opposite: high-level circulation can amplify error, not correct it.
It’s also a subtle act of reputation management. Kay doesn’t say "I was wrong" or "the evidence was flawed". He says "the best evidence that I had seen" and "my view was", insulating the statement inside the boundaries of what felt reasonable at the time. That phrasing shifts accountability from judgment to information flow: the problem becomes what was available to be seen, not the decision to interpret it aggressively.
Context sharpens the intent. Kay led the Iraq Survey Group in 2003-04 and ultimately reported that Iraq did not possess stockpiled WMDs. After that, his public role was partly explanatory, partly defensive: how did smart institutions, experts, and lawmakers converge on a false certainty? The Kennedy reference is doing political work in that narrative, signaling that elite consensus existed before the invasion.
The line’s quiet cynicism is that it asks the listener to focus on who was briefed, not on what was true. It treats proximity to power as a proxy for credibility, when the Iraq WMD saga proved the opposite: high-level circulation can amplify error, not correct it.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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