THE KAY REPORT

Is here. Don't trust the Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times (especially the LA Times) on this--read it for yourself, then draw conclusions.

I'm skimming it in between other stuff, but so far Andrew Sullivan seems to be right about it. It's stronger than the press is making it out to be.

One important point that should also get some attention is that this report is an interim work--not a final, nail it down piece. The investigation is ongoing.

For a teaser, here's a major quote near the top of the report:

We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.

In other words, the war was justified according to the UN sanctions against Saddam. He didn't even comply with the last-ditch inspections regime that the French intended to bollix up the war and save his hide. Saddam betrayed his European allies, and thwarted Hans Blix, right up to the end. He had to go.

MORE: The report also indicates an active working alliance between Saddam and North Korea for technology trade. Couple that with reports that the Iranians have a cadre of North Korean scientists working on their nuclear program, and you have the Axis of Evil working together in fact, with North Korea acting as a kind of tech hub. And the Axis states were working on missiles that had been banned for Saddam's use, and nuclear weapons banned for all three countries.

MORE: The role of student visas:

"The IIS also played a prominent role in sponsoring students for overseas graduate studies in the biological sciences, according to Iraqi scientists and IIS sources, providing an important avenue for further BW-applicable research."

Student visas represent a massive hole in the West's collective armor. I don't know the answer to patching that hole--blacklisting students from certain countries may be an option, though doing that would probably also keep us from finding potential allies within rogue states, not to mention the PC outcry that doing so would generate. But something needs to be done.

On the evil of the Saddam regime:

A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

Shades of Auschwitz. And a violation of the UN disarmament sanctions.

Does any of this sound like an "imminent threat?" No. But the President never argued that Iraq was an imminent threat. He argued that we should strike before the threat became imminent, because once the threat is imminent--Saddam is fully re-armed--it's too late to deal with him without massive loss of life. That's a debatable point, but it is where the debate should center because it is the point he offered. He never cited an imminent threat, contrary to what the political opposition will insist in the coming days and weeks.

On biological warfare:

With regard to biological warfare activities, which has been one of our two initial areas of focus, ISG teams are uncovering significant information - including research and development of BW-applicable organisms, the involvement of Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in possible BW activities, and deliberate concealment activities. All of this suggests Iraq after 1996 further compartmentalized its program and focused on maintaining smaller, covert capabilities that could be activated quickly to surge the production of BW agents.

Debriefings of IIS officials and site visits have begun to unravel a clandestine network of laboratories and facilities within the security service apparatus. This network was never declared to the UN and was previously unknown.

We are still working on determining the extent to which this network was tied to large-scale military efforts or BW terror weapons, but this clandestine capability was suitable for preserving BW expertise, BW capable facilities and continuing R&D - all key elements for maintaining a capability for resuming BW production.

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Discussions with Iraqi scientists uncovered agent R&D work that paired overt work with non-pathogenic organisms serving as surrogates for prohibited investigation with pathogenic agents.

Examples include: B. Thurengiensis (Bt) with B. anthracis (anthrax), and medicinal plants with ricin. In a similar vein, two key former BW scientists, confirmed that Iraq under the guise of legitimate activity developed refinements of processes and products relevant to BW agents.

All of this activity was illegal, outside the bounds of what Saddam's regime was allowed to do, and constitute causes to remove him. And ricin, mentioned in the graph above, turned up on terrorists in France as well as in al Qaeda-linked camps in northern Iraq. Connected? Very possible.

On the difficulty inherent to the search:

A very large body of information has been developed through debriefings, site visits, and exploitation of captured Iraqi documents that confirms that Iraq concealed equipment and materials from UN inspectors when they returned in 2002.

One noteworthy example is a collection of reference strains that ought to have been declared to the UN. Among them was a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced. This discovery - hidden in the home of a BW scientist - illustrates the point I made earlier about the difficulty of locating small stocks of material that can be used to covertly surge production of deadly weapons.

The scientist who concealed the vials containing this agent has identified a large cache of agents that he was asked, but refused, to conceal. ISG is actively searching for this second cache.

Point one is that this bioweapon activity was illegal, and continued right up to the end. Point two is that concealing stocks of toxins is very easy, as they're quite small. In a country the size of Iraq (roughly the size of Texas), hiding vials of toxins is child's play. Finding them may be nearly impossible. But they are probably still out there somewhere.

It's like the proverbial search for needles in haystacks:

Let me turn now to chemical weapons (CW). In searching for retained stocks of chemical munitions, ISG has had to contend with the almost unbelievable scale of Iraq's conventional weapons armoury, which dwarfs by orders of magnitude the physical size of any conceivable stock of chemical weapons.

For example, there are approximately 130 known Iraqi Ammunition Storage Points (ASP), many of which exceed 50 square miles in size and hold an estimated 600,000 tons of artillery shells, rockets, aviation bombs and other ordinance.

Of these 130 ASPs, approximately 120 still remain unexamined. As Iraqi practice was not to mark much of their chemical ordinance and to store it at the same ASPs that held conventional rounds, the size of the required search effort is enormous.

Ten sites down, 120 to go. It's still very possible that the search team will find stocks of chemical weapons shells.