Lawmakers Confront Rumsfeld

Under grilling by Democratic lawmakers, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld insisted Wednesday that it was still too early to conclude that weapons of mass destruction would not be found in Iraq.

Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee that “there’s work still to be done” in surveying Iraq’s weapons programs, “and it is too soon to come to final conclusions.” The hole in which former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was found Dec. 13 “was big enough to hold biological weapons to kill thousands” of people, Rumsfeld said.

“Such objects, once buried, can stay buried,” he added.

In his first public comments on the issue since former top U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told Congress last week that he believed U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s weapons programs was flawed, Rumsfeld said in back-to-back hearings of the Senate and House Armed Services committees that the Bush administration did not manipulate or misuse prewar intelligence to support its goal of deposing Hussein.

Rumsfeld and other top administration officials had asserted before the war that chemical and biological weapons existed in Iraq and that they posed a grave and immediate threat. No such weapons have been found.

“I am convinced that the president did the right thing in Iraq,” Rumsfeld told the House committee. “I came to my conclusions based on the intelligence that we saw.”

CIA Director George J. Tenet is expected to defend the intelligence-gathering when he speaks today at Georgetown University.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told Rumsfeld that Kay’s conclusions represent “a devastating refutation of the Bush administration’s case for war in Iraq” that “seriously undermines our credibility in the world.”

Kennedy suggested that an investigative commission planned by President Bush “look hard and fast at not just what the intelligence was, but how it was manipulated” by administration policymakers.

Kennedy and other Democrats on the Senate committee reminded Rumsfeld of his words in September 2002, when he said “we know” where weapons of mass destruction are stored, even as a Defense Intelligence Agency report – since declassified – said that “there is no reliable information” on the production in Iraq of a chemical weapons stockpile.

“How do you explain that?” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) asked. “What was the basis of the intel of those statements of certainty?”

Rumsfeld acknowledged that he had made it sound as though he was talking about actual weapons. But he said he was referring to suspected weapons sites. The remark “probably turned out not to be what one would have preferred, in retrospect,” he said.

Republican members of the Senate committee, chaired by Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), defended the administration and commended Bush for ordering an investigation.

Rumsfeld offered several “alternative views” about why no illicit weapons had been discovered in Iraq, beginning with the possibility that such arms never existed.

“I suppose that’s possible, but not likely,” he said.

Rumsfeld said weapons might have been transferred to another country before U.S. troops arrived in March, hidden in Iraq, or destroyed by the Iraqis before the war.

“We may eventually find it in the months ahead,” he said.