"Unscom was like crack cocaine for the CIA."

Fascinating report. Of course, it's going to get mis-quoted all over the place.

Points that I found particularly of note:

- He said Baghdad was actively working to produce a biological weapon using the poison ricin until the American invasion last March.

- He resigned, not because he felt the hunt for weapons was misguided, but "because he disagreed with the decision in November by the administration and the Pentagon to shift intelligence resources from the hunt for banned weapons to counterinsurgency efforts inside Iraq."

- According to Kay, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state

- "We know that terrorists were passing through Iraq," he said. "And now we know that there was little control over Iraq's weapons capabilities. I think it shows that Iraq was a very dangerous place. The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country — and no central control."

(Update: The New York Times article has been moved into archives and is now only freely available in abstract form. A mirrored extract can be seen here:
http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/nation/7798415.htm )