"We led this search to find the truth, not to find the weapons. The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist, we've got to deal with that difference and understand why," Kay said Sunday on the National Public Radio program "Weekend Edition."

Asked whether he feels President Bush owes the American people an apology for starting the war on the basis of apparently flawed intelligence, Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president rather than the president owing the American people.

"You have to remember that this view of Iraq was held during the Clinton administration and didn't change in the Bush administration. It is not a political `got you' issue. It is a serious issue of how you could come to the conclusion that is not matched by the future."

"It's not a political issue. Its an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."

Since Kay's resignation Friday as the top U.S. weapons investigator in Iraq, Kay has said Iraq had no large-scale weapons production program during the 1990s, after it lost the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and no large numbers of mass destruction weapons were available for "imminent action."

Still, "that is not the same thing as saying it was not a serious, imminent threat," he said Sunday. "That is a political judgment," he said, "not a technical judgment."
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"I must say I actually think Iraq — what we learned during the inspections — made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war," Kay added.

FOXNews.com(via Blogs4Bush)