A September 2002 report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff detailing a lack of evidence for Iraq's chemical weapons program was seen by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but was not shared with everyone in the George W. Bush administration,
Politico reports.
"Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD. It is big," Rumsfeld wrote to Joint Chiefs Chairman General Richard Myers.
But it is not clear the report, which weakened the administration's argument for an invasion of Iraq, was seen by anyone else on the Bush team.
Instead, Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell argued publicly that there was, indeed, strong evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction – and was within a decade of acquiring a nuclear weapon.
Rumsfeld was under no legal obligation to share the report, Politico notes, but his decision not to do so raises questions as to whether his decision was based on a desire to avoid undermining the White House's argument for war.
"The JCS report undercut their assertions, and if it had been shared more widely within the administration, the debate would have been very different," Politico writes.
Rumsfeld had said months earlier in relation to Iraq's WMD program, "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."
The September report appears to have made some of those "known knowns" more "unknown."
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