Turns out, according to Politico’s John Walcott, there were some known unknowns and some unknown unknowns that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld knew about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in September 2002. And he didn’t share those with others in the run-up to war.
In August 2002, Rumsfeld had asked Air Force Maj. Gen. Glen Shaffer, head of the Joint Staff’s intelligence directorate, for a report on Iraq’s WMDs. Although the report was declassified in 2011 and posted on Rumsfeld’s website then, it has not previously garnered any attention.
The eight-page September 2, 2002, document, titled “Status of Iraq’s WMD Programs,” was passed along to Rumsfeld by Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time. The general noted in his two-sentence cover memo to Rumsfeld, “It is big.”
The report appeared on Rumsfeld’s desk right in the middle of the administration’s effort to “educate” the public about what it claimed was a serious threat from Iraq. The report noted that “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns [...] Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”
Myers already knew about the report. The Joint Staff’s director for intelligence had prepared it, but Rumsfeld’s urgent tone said a great deal about how seriously the head of the Defense Department viewed the report’s potential to undermine the Bush administration’s case for war. But he never shared the eight-page report with key members of the administration such as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell or top officials at the CIA, according to multiple sources at the State Department, White House and CIA who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. Instead, the report disappeared, and with it a potentially powerful counter-narrative to the administration’s argument that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons posed a grave threat to the U.S. and its allies, which was beginning to gain traction in major news outlets, led by the New York Times.
It’s also not known whether the report was sent along to President Bush. But a staff member for the Joint Chiefs who was copied in on the document at the time it was sent to Rumsfeld told Politico: “That’s the last place they would have sent it.”