Sen. Wyden: Rumsfeld Should Be Held AccountableAs we’ve been reporting, Phase II of the Senate intel committee’s report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq has been released, and all day lawmakers have been issuing statements of shock and incredulity.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a member of the authoring Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, called today for a review of whether then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s testimony to Congress was true, given the information in the report.
Specifically cited are quotes from Rumsfeld’s testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on September 18 and 19, 2002:
They now have massive tunneling systems… They’ve got all kinds of thing that have happened in the period when the inspectors have been out. So the problem is greater today. And the regime that exists today in the U.N. is one that has far fewer teeth than the one you are describing.
— Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 18, 2002Even the most intrusive inspection regime would have difficulty getting at all of [Saddam Hussein’s] weapons of mass destruction. Many of his WMD capabilities are mobile; they can be hidden from inspectors no matter how intrusive. He has vast underground networks and facilities and sophisticated denial and deception techniques
— Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 18, 2002[W]e simply do not know where all or even a large portion of Iraq’s WMD facilities are. We do know where a fraction of them are. . .[O]f the facilities we do know, not all are vulnerable to attack from the air. A good many are underground and deeply buried. . .
— Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Testimony before the House Armed Services Committiee, September 19, 2002.
On page 50 the report states it’s conclusion after investigating these statements from Rumsfeld:
The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information. [Emphasis ours.]
Wyden had a thing or two to say about Rumfeld’s “not substantiated” testimony:
This is stunning: the Secretary of Defense, testifying before Congress about whether or not ground forces would be strategically necessary in a war against Iraq, said that the Executive Branch “knew” something that it did not know.
The intelligence available at the time made this clear, and two months later a report prepared specifically for Secretary Rumsfeld directly contradicted what he told the Committee. As far as I know, neither Rumsfeld nor anyone else from his office made any attempt to contact the Committee and correct the public record, and the result was that Congress and the American people were misled on a question of the utmost importance. I do not think that this is a matter that Congress can afford to ignore and I hope that the Armed Services Committee will take a serious look at Secretary Rumsfeld’s statements.
We’ll be bringing you more from Phase II, but please, keep your comments and observations coming.
