By William Branigin Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, February 4, 2004; 3:31 PM
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld held out the possibility today that U.S. investigators would eventually find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and said he doubted the "theory" of a former chief weapons inspector that Iraq did not possess stockpiles of such weapons before U.S. forces invaded last year.
Addressing the Senate Armed Services Committee for the first time since David Kay told the same panel last week that intelligence analysts were "almost all wrong" about banned weapons in Iraq, Rumsfeld defended President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, and he denied that administration officials had manipulated the intelligence to justify the invasion.
But under Democratic questioning, he backed away from his assertion before the war that the administration knew former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion.
"Intelligence will never be perfect," Rumsfeld said. "We do not, will not and cannot know everything that's going on in this world of ours." He added: "I'm convinced that the president of the United states did the right thing in Iraq; let there be no doubt."
Rumsfeld spoke to the Senate panel in the chamber normally used by the House Armed Services Committee because the discovery of the toxin ricin in a suite of offices used by the Senate majority leader had resulted in the closure of three Senate office buildings yesterday.
The defense secretary also defended the U.S. intelligence community, saying they could be excused for concluding that Hussein was pursuing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
"He did not behave like someone who was disarming and wanted to prove he was doing so," Rumsfeld said. "The Congress [and] the national security teams of both the Clinton and the Bush administrations looked at essentially the same intelligence, and they came to similar conclusions that the Iraqi regime posed a danger and should be changed."
Rumsfeld put forward several "alternative views" on why nothing has been found in Iraq so far to confirm the prewar estimates of weapons of mass destruction, known as WMD.
"First is the theory that WMD may not have existed at the start of the war," he said. "I suppose that's possible, but not likely."
He said other possibilities were that chemical or biological weapons did exist in Iraq, but were moved to one or more other countries; that the banned weapons were "dispersed and hidden throughout Iraq;" that the country's WMD was destroyed before the war; that Iraq had only small quantities of biological or chemical weapons with a "surge capability for a rapid buildup;" and that the whole WMD program was "a charade by the Iraqis," with Hussein either fooling the world or being fooled himself by subordinates.
Rumsfeld did not say which view, if any, he believed. But he suggested that chemical or biological weapons could still be hidden in Iraq.
"Think, it took us 10 months to find Saddam Hussein," he told the committee. "The reality is that the hole he was found hiding in was large enough to hold enough biological weapons to kill thousands of human beings. . . . And unlike Saddam Hussein, such objects, once buried, can stay buried. In a country the size of California, the chances of inspectors finding something buried in the ground without their being led to it by people knowledgeable about where it was is minimal."
While U.S. investigators have not proven that Hussein had the weapons that intelligence analysts said he did, they also have "not proven the opposite," Rumsfeld said. When the work of the 1,300-member Iraq Survey Group is complete, he said, "we will know more."
Rumsfeld came in for some sharp questioning by Democrats on the committee, notably Sens. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who cited U.S. intelligence studies that said there was no reliable evidence of Iraq's production and stockpiling of chemical weapons before the war.
Kay's conclusion that Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction when the war began "is a devastating refutation of the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq and, I think, seriously undermines our credibility in the world," Kennedy told Rumsfeld. The Massachusetts Democrat also blasted the Bush administration's proposal for an "independent, bipartisan" inquiry into the intelligence failure. What the government was offering, he said, was an "investigation by a committee hand-picked by the administration, with findings to be made only after the 2004 election."
Under questioning from Kennedy, Rumsfeld backed away from his September 2002 Senate testimony in which he said "we know" that Hussein continues to hide large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
"I could be wrong," Rumsfeld said today. "I'm asked a lot of questions. I use a lot of words, and I'm sure, from time to time, I say something that, in retrospect, I wish I hadn't."
He recalled another occasion on which he had expressed such certainty, after U.S. forces had invaded Iraq and he was asked where the weapons of mass destruction were.
"And I may have said -- I think I said -- 'We know where they are. They're up north. They're not down here.' And I was referring to the suspect sites. And you're quite right; shorthand, 'We know where they are,' probably turned out not to be exactly what one would have preferred in retrospect."