Fact Checking Rummy

The Seattle P-I's Washington Bureau writer takes a look at last week's kerfuffle between Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and former CIA officer Ray McGovern (see the video here at ThinkProgress), and finds that Rummy is a bit of a history revisionist:

Rumsfeld's latest effort at backtracking on his prewar statements came Thursday at a contentious public forum in Atlanta when he faced a handful of hecklers and an anti-war questioner in the audience, who charged that he had lied about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction, which was President Bush's chief rationale for invading the country and starting the war.

The Pentagon chief denied he had lied and said he had relied on official intelligence reports about Saddam's weapons.

His questioner persisted: "You said you knew where they were."

Rumsfeld: "I did not. I said I knew where 'suspect' sites were."

The record shows that in the weeks preceding the war, Rumsfeld flatly claimed to know the whereabouts of Saddam's WMD arsenal.

On March 30, 2003, 11 days into the war, Rumsfeld was asked in an ABC News interview if he was surprised that American forces had not yet found any weapons of mass destruction.

"Not at all," Rumsfeld said, according to an official Pentagon transcript. "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."

The story goes on to offer several other attempts by Rummy to rewrite what he flatly stated in public--from Iraqis welcoming us with flowers and open arms (not small arms fire) and evidence linking Saddam with al Qaeda. Now, this is good journalism, not stenography.