Washington, May 30: US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has denied that the United States invaded Iraq under a "false pretext," saying it believed then and still believes that the regime of Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. "I can assure you that this war was not waged under any false pretext," Rumsfeld said yesterday in a radio interview.
"We believed then and we believe now that the Iraqis have had chemical weapons, biological weapons and that they had a program to develop nuclear weapons but did not have nuclear weapons," he said. "That is what the United Kingdom's intelligence suggested as well." The failure of US forces to find any of the banned weapons since the regime's ouster seven weeks ago has raised growing questions over the weapons of mass destruction charges that served as the prime US rationale for the war.
The British government also was on the defensive yesterday after a media report said that it had embellished a paper released in September on Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction with the claim that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes. The report said the British intelligence agencies opposed including the assertion in the dossier because the source for it was unreliable. Bureau Report