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.”
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