Defense chief focuses on verbatim transcripts at cost of larger context
By Eric Rosenberg
Hearst Newspapers
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.07.2006
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to rewrite history last week when he denied making prewar claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Rumsfeld's latest backtracking on his prewar statements came last 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.
The Pentagon chief denied that 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 said he knew 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."
"Never said that"
On Feb. 20, 2003, a month before the invasion, Jim Lehrer asked Rumsfeld on the PBS show "The News Hour" if 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 connected 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-Qaida 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 earlier assassination attempt — Rumsfeld was asked about his prewar remarks.
"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."
WMD claims not "extensive"
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," according to the committee's transcript.
That theme continued right up to the weeks before the invasion. At a Jan. 29, 2003, Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld said 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 weapons of mass destruction 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. "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.' "
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