Rumsfeld denies making claims Iraq had WMDs

You know, you just could not write a bad novel about the war in Iraq and say how, a couple of years down the road, claim that the Secretary of Defense would say that he never claimed they knew there were "weapons of mass destruction." No publisher would buy it and no author would be dumb enough to write such a tall tale.

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/269394_rumsfeld08.html

Rumsfeld denies making claims Iraq had WMDs

'Never said that ... never did,' defense secretary now asserts

Monday, May 8, 2006

By ERIC ROSENBERG
P-I WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to rewrite history last week when he denied making prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Rumsfeld's latest effort at backtracking on his prewar statements came Thursday at a contentious public forum in Atlanta when he faced a handful of hecklers and an anti-war questioner in the audience, who charged that he had lied about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction, which was President Bush's chief rationale for invading the country and starting the war.



The Pentagon chief denied he had lied and said he had relied on official intelligence reports about Saddam's weapons.

His questioner persisted: "You said you knew where they were."

Rumsfeld: "I did not. I said I knew where 'suspect' sites were."

The record shows that in the weeks preceding the war, Rumsfeld flatly claimed to know the whereabouts of Saddam's WMD arsenal.

On March 30, 2003, 11 days into the war, Rumsfeld was asked in an ABC News interview if he was surprised that American forces had not yet found any weapons of mass destruction.

"Not at all," Rumsfeld said, according to an official Pentagon transcript. "The area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

His comments in Atlanta were in line with an earlier attempted revision.

Six months after the invasion, on Sept. 10, 2003, Rumsfeld revisited the WMD issue in remarks at the National Press Club.

"I said, 'We know they're in that area,' " referring to the weapons. "I should have said, 'I believe we're in that area. Our intelligence tells us they're in that area,' and that was our best judgment."

On Iraqis welcoming the invasion

On Feb. 20, 2003, a month before the invasion, Jim Lehrer asked Rumsfeld on PBS' "NewsHour" program whether he thought the invasion would "be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq."

"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld said, referring to American forces in Iraq.

He then tried to merge the earlier invasion of Afghanistan with the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"Go back to Afghanistan. The people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do," Rumsfeld continued. "Saddam Hussein has one of the most vicious regimes on the face of the Earth. And the people know that."

On Sept. 25, 2003 -- six months after the invasion and a day on which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier -- Rumsfeld was asked about his prewar claims.

"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently, and you said ... they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.

The defense chief quickly cut him off.

"Never said that," Rumsfeld said, according to the official Pentagon transcript. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find anywhere me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said. I may look like somebody else."

On Saddam's weapons arsenal

Six months before the invasion, when testifying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 19, 2002, Rumsfeld said Saddam "has amassed large clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons. ... His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons," according to the committee's transcript.

That theme continued right up to the weeks before the invasion.

On Jan. 20, 2003, Rumsfeld told an audience at the Reserve Officers Association that Saddam "has large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons including VX, sarin, mustard gas, anthrax, botulism and possibly smallpox."

At a Jan. 29, 2003, Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld claimed that "the Iraqi regime has not accounted for some 38,000 liters of botulism toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard gas, VX nerve agent, upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical weapons," along with mobile biological weapons labs.

After U.S. inspectors failed to locate any WMD seven months after the invasion, a reporter at a Pentagon news conference asked Rumsfeld:

"In retrospect, were you a little too far-leaning in your statement that Iraq categorically had caches of weapons, of chemical and biological weapons, given what's been found to date? You painted a picture of extensive stocks" of Iraqi mass-killing weapons.

"Wait," Rumsfeld interjected. "You go back and give me something that talks about extensive stocks. The U.N. reported extensive stocks. That is where that came from. I said what I believed to be the case, and I don't -- I'd be surprised if you found the word 'extensive.' "

On linking Saddam and al-Qaida

On Sept. 27, 2002, at a Chamber of Commerce lunch in Atlanta, Rumsfeld asserted that the Bush administration had "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam and al-Qaida, the organization that carried out the Sept, 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

The assertion of a connection with the organization that perpetrated the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil provided a secondary rational for the invasion.

But on Oct. 4, 2004, Rumsfeld revised his assertion, telling the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two."

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