Last night on CNN’s Larry King Live, Donald Rumsfeld was asked about 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern, who recently told the Secretary of Defense he lied when he said he knew where the WMD were located in Iraq in March 2003. Rumsfeld refused to acknowledge his error and falsely claimed he was talking about “suspect sites.” Watch it:
Here’s what Rumsfeld said last night:
I said because they’ve just gotten in the southern part of the country and we know, I said something to that effect, that the suspect sites or sites were — meaning suspect sites were up in the area of Baghdad and north. That’s where the intelligence community said them. And we weren’t there yet. We hadn’t covered that piece of real estate.
In fact, Rumsfeld made no mention of “suspect sites” in his entire March 2003 interview on ABC’s This Week. He plainly stated, without qualification, that “we know where [the WMD] are.” Here’s a transcript:
STEPHANOPOULOS: [I]s it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven’t found any weapons of mass destruction?
RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think — let me take that, both pieces — the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.