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Thanks to the always-excellent Josh Marshall:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: David Kay is in charge of our effort now, with some 1,500 inspectors and analysts and experts. He will provide an interim report later this month, and I am confident when people see what David Kay puts forward they will see that there was no question that such weapons exist, existed, and so did the programs to develop one.

Colin Powell
Meet The Press
September 7th, 2003

David Kay is not going to be done with this for quite some time. And I would not count on reports. I suppose there may be interim reports. I don't know when those will be, and I don't know what the public nature of them will be.

Condi Rice
Press Briefing
September 22nd, 2003

At this point, I no longer believe a word that comes from the mouth of anyone in this administration. That includes "and" and "the".

Update, with annotations:

Officials to Get Update on Iraq WMD Hunt
The man in charge of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is briefing senior intelligence officials in Washington this week but the public may not be told of his findings right away. [Translation: we're going to sit on this for as long as we can and see if we can slip it out when something else is going on and hope nobody notices, 'cause we ain't got shit.]

CIA adviser David Kay is expected to complete his progress report to agency Director George J. Tenet soon, U.S. officials said. [Note the subtle bait-and-switch, as we go from talking about his findings to him giving a progress report. Probably took all of 15 seconds: We're done with the searching, but the creative writing team needs a few more weeks.]

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice suggested there are no plans to release Kay's findings immediately. There had been expectations in Washington that the report would come out this month. [We've gone to Plan B. Plan A was to broadcast triumphantly that we'd found the smoking gun. Now that we've found nothing but smoke, let's pretend it was never such a big deal despite confident pronouncements like the one above from Colin Powell.]

Secretary of State Colin Powell said early(sic) that Kay "will be putting out a report in the very near future, and I look forward to seeing it, as everyone else does. From what I have heard, he has assembled a great deal of useful information." [Useful to whom, one wonders? And am I the only one who finds it a bit hard to believe that Powell has only "heard" about what's going on?]

I've come to a conclusion, though. After reading the sentence "There had been expectations in Washington that the report would come out this month," I'd like to be an editor. Just for a few days. I'd take anyone who writes sentences in the passive voice like that and fire them. Preferably from a cannon.