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| Iraq |
| Rumsfeld: Chemical weapons dumped before war? |
| 2003-05-28 |
| NEW YORK -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested publicly for the first time Tuesday that Iraq might have destroyed chemical and biological weapons before the war there, a possibility that senior U.S. officers in Iraq have raised in recent weeks. Rumsfeld has expressed optimism that it is just a matter of time, and interviewing enough senior Iraqi scientists and former government officials, before military teams uncover the illicit arms that President George W. Bush cited as a major reason for attacking Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein's government. While Rumsfeld repeated that assertion Tuesday, he added, "It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict." Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, now in northern Iraq, mentioned the same possibility two weeks ago. Senior defense aides insisted that Rumsfeld's response to a question after his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Tuesday broke no new ground, and was consistent with his past explanations. He said military investigators have been searching in earnest for only seven weeks, that Iraqi weapons might be buried in one of several hundred uninspected sites and that investigators' best leads could come from Iraqi officials who have only recently surrendered or been captured. "I don't know the answer," Rumsfeld said. "I suspect we'll learn a lot more as we go along and keep interrogating people." But the fact that Rumsfeld even raised the possibility that Iraq might have destroyed unconventional weapons before the war prompts new questions about the intelligence Bush and his senior advisers relied on to go to war, and on the credibility of the United States, defense analysts said Tuesday. "They don't have a good explanation, and therefore are trying to come up with as long a list as possible," said Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "But it's impossible to destroy or hide the quantities the administration said they had without our noticing it." Come now, Inspector Clouseau, er, Blix, was an acknowledged master at not finding anything! Bush, in an interview last month with NBC News, acknowledged, "there's going to be skepticism until people find out there was, in fact, a weapons of mass destruction program." Whereupon the radical left will simply claim that it was all planted, fake, etc. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #3 Yeap,definite traces of sarin,and Mustard agents. |
| Posted by: Raptor 2003-05-29 08:31:03 |
| #2 Didn't the military find definite traces of Something Awful in the Euphrates? I remember a bit of that, but nothing since other than on Sean Hannity's show once in awhile. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2003-05-28 20:17:39 |
| #1 Yeah. I think they dumped them in Syria. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2003-05-28 16:51:07 |