At his press conference Wednesday, President Bush said,”David Kay came to see me yesterday. He’s going to testify in a closed hearing tomorrow — which in Washington may not be so closed, as you know.” Mr. Kay is the veteran weapons inspector heading up the American effort to assess Saddam Hussein’s efforts to amass and conceal chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. And indeed, some details of Mr. Kay’s briefing emerged yesterday in comments he made on Capitol Hill. The Daily Telegraph’s David Rennie quotes Mr. Kay as saying, “We have found new evidence of how they successfully misled inspections of the U.N. and hid stuff continuously from them.…The active deception program is truly amazing once you get inside it. We had people who participated in deceiving U.N inspectors now telling us how they did it. We have Iraqi scientists who were involved in these programs who are assisting us in taking them apart.”

If Saddam didn’t have the weapons, why was he so eager to deceive the U.N. inspectors? And if the U.N. weapons inspectors were being deceived, how could Americans be confident that Saddam wasn’t hid ing weapons of mass destruction? The sort of biological weapons on which Mr. Kay is reportedly focusing his investigation are lethal — just ask the families of the postal workers who died in the anthrax letter attacks in Washington. If the Democrats want to be the party that believes in letting aggressive, brutal dictators like Saddam get away with deceiving the United Nations and leaving the world in the dark about his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs — well, in the post-September 11 world, they are going to be the minority party for a long time.

Our own view is that more details of Saddam’s weapons program will emerge once Saddam himself is caught or killed. Mr. Bush and Mr. Kay don’t seem in any great rush to put the evidence out in a piecemeal fashion. They’d rather wait until all the facts can be analyzed together. What a coincidence it would be if by then, Howard Dean — an outspoken critic of the Iraq war — is well on his way to the Democratic presidential nomination. And how wonderful would it be if by then there is a free, democratic leader of Iraq to help Mr. Bush show the world the weapons Saddam was hiding.