March 30 In the second week of the war, Rumsfeld is asked on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" if he was surprised that no WMD had yet been found, being that coalition forces already controlled so much of the country.

"Not at all," Rumsfeld said. Coalition forces controlled substantial portions of the country, but those "happen not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed." Don't worry, Rumsfeld conveyed. "We know where they are," he said. "They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

In April, President Bush lowered the evidence bar, stating in an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw that the United States would find not WMD but evidence of WMD programs. By May 4, Rumsfeld was telling "Fox News Sunday's" Tony Snow that the administration "never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country," since Iraq had spent so much time hiding its weapons.

Recent weeks have seen a number of confusing and seemingly contradictory statements from the White House. Speaking to Polish TV on May 30, the president flatly declared that the hunt was over. "We found the weapons of mass destruction," Bush said. "For those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, we found them." The president was referring to two trailers that Kurdish forces found in late April near Mosul, ones that the CIA has ruled, "probably" were designed to produce biological weapons, though that claim has been disputed within the CIA.

Since that Polish pronouncement, however, the president has taken great pains to speak precisely about the trailers, telling cheering soldiers in Qatar on June 5 that coalition forces had found "two mobile biological weapons facilities which are capable of producing biological agents," not quite an announcement of the discovery of a smoking gun. Last week, Bush stated precisely that "Iraq had a weapons program; intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program," and that he is "absolutely convinced with time we'll find out that they did have a weapons program." Asked to explain the shift in rhetoric that transpired as the president hopped from Poland to Qatar, spokesman Fleischer claimed that the president uses the terms "WMD" and "WMD programs" interchangeably and thus there never was any shift at all.

Perhaps the most revealing conversation, however, came on May 27, when Rumsfeld made another sharp rhetorical turn before the Council on Foreign Relations. There he was asked where the disconnect was between the outfitting of tens of thousands of coalition troops with chemical and biological weapon suits and the failure of any of these weapons to be used. Rumsfeld's response didn't seem to indicate that there was much intelligence behind the claims. He reached back to "facts" that preceded the first Gulf War. "We know the Iraqis used chemical weapons against the Iranians," he said. "We had facts. We know they used chemical weapons against their own population and killed tens of thousands with chemical weapons." Second, Rumsfeld said, intelligence agencies picked up "people chatting with each other," saying things like "Don't mention these words" and "Don't say that." Bearing in mind the past chemical weapons programs, the administration concluded that "they were talking about these programs in one way or another."

"Now, what happened?" Rumsfeld asked. "Why weren't [the WMD] used? I don't know." The Iraqis may have "decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict," he said. "I don't know the answer."

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