Kay on Capitol Hill

I haven’t found a full transcript for David Kay’s hearing on Capitol Hill today, but CNN has a transcript of Kay’s opening remarks.

Here’s Kay’s bottom line:

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of [U.N.] Resolution 1441.

Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities — one last chance to come clean about what it had.

We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.

Everything I’ve seen about David Kay indicates he’s a standup guy. He’s not pointing fingers, he’s not blaming anybody, and he’s not a puppet of the Bush administration (he’s said he believes there should be an independent investigation, while the administration to this point hasn’t indicated any desire for that to happen). It seems he just wants to get to the bottom of the intelligence failures, and that’s an admirable thing. I honestly don’t know if it’s possible to do so in an election year, however.