Nation deserves answers.

Byline: The Register-Guard

The Bush administration has started to dance around its longstanding claim that Saddam Hussein's regime harbored an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

But this Texas two-step doesn't cut it - not in the wake of the definitive statement by David Kay that he found no illicit weapons in Iraq and doesn't believe they exist.

Kay, who recently resigned as chief of the U.S. team searching for WMDs in Iraq, became fed up with the White House's refusal to acknowledge the weakness of its primary justification for going to war - that Iraq's weapons programs posed an imminent threat to the United States and the world.

President Bush could have used his State of the Union address to explain to the American people how intelligence reports wrongly concluded that Saddam's regime was armed with chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq was dangerously close to developing a nuclear weapons capability.

Instead, Bush insisted once again that the administration got it right on Iraq. "Had we failed to act, the dictator's weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day," he said.

Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney seems oblivious to the failure of U.S. weapons inspectors to find either WMD stockpiles or evidence of programs to develop them. Last week, Cheney repeated the treadworn assertion that U.S. forces had discovered two mobile biological weapons labs - trailers that Kay concluded were used to deploy weather balloons.

White House officials say they want to wait until the search for WMDs, now more than 85 percent done, is completed, before making a final assessment. Fair enough. But the president and vice president should stop insulting the intelligence of Americans by reciting a justification for war that already has been largely disproved.

Administration officials note that the intelligence agencies of France, Russia and Germany concluded before the war that Saddam might have weapons of mass destruction. But there's a critical difference: Those nations correctly concluded that Iraq did not pose an imminent risk that justified a preventive war.

It's already been established that pre-war U.S. intelligence was terribly skewed. But it has yet to be established how the CIA and other agencies got it so wrong. Was it a matter of sloppy intelligence gathering and analysis? Or, an even more disturbing possibility: Were intelligence agencies pressured by administration officials into producing a tailor-made justification for a long-planned invasion of Iraq?

As the search for weapons begins to wind down in Iraq, Congress should begin its own search for the truth about the administration's justification for war and yet another frightening breakdown of this country's intelligence system.

Americans, in whose name this war was waged and whose sons and daughters have died in its execution, deserve a full accounting.