Transcript: Senate Armed Services Committee:Testimony of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Sen. Kennedy: "Mr. Secretary, as the U.S. Iraqi weapons inspector, David Kay, made it clear in the recent days, that his exhaustive postwar inspection leave little doubt that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction at the time the war began. And his conclusion is a devastating refutation of the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq and I think seriously undermines our credibility in the world. Until now, the administration has resisted the independent investigation of the issue, but now it's proposing investigation by committee hand-picked by the administration, with findings to be made only after 2004 election. So I think the White House agenda is clear, is to blame the failure of the administration's case for war on the intelligence community, rather than the administration's manipulations and misrepresentations on the available intelligence. So the debacle cannot all be blamed on the intelligence community. Key policy-makers made crystal clear the results they wanted from the intelligence community. Mr. Kay said, "We were all wrong"; he's wrong. Many in the intelligence community were right. And so there are clear warnings from the intelligence community. But to sense within the intelligence community that many of the positions taken by the administration were not noted or glossed over. As Senator Levin pointed out, your own Defense Intelligence Agency, in September of 2002, said, "There's no reliable information" -- no reliable information, Mr. Secretary -- "whether Iraq is producing, stockpiling chemical weapons or where Iraq has or will establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities." KENNEDY: The State Department Bureau of Intelligence concluded, "The activities we have detected do not add up to a compelling case that Iraq is pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated, comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons. INR considers the available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment." Department of Energy intelligence disagreed that the famous tubes were a nuclear weapons program. State Department Intelligence Bureau also concluded that the tubes were not intended for use in Iraq's nuclear weapons. Greg Thielmann, a retired career State Department official, had served as director of the Office of Strategic Proliferation and Military Affairs in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said it all last July: "Some of the fault lies with the performance of the intelligence community. Most of it lies with the way senior officials misused the information they were provided." He said, "They surveyed the data, picked out what they liked. The whole thing was bizarre. The secretary of defense had this huge Defense Intelligence Agency and he went around it." Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, recently retired Air Force intelligence officer, served in the Pentagon during the buildup to the war, said, "It wasn't intelligence, it was propaganda. They take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, usually by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." We've seen in the examples that were mentioned this morning, for example, just on the issues of stockpiling on chemical weapons, as mentioned by Senator Levin, 2002, DIA said no reliable information on whether producing and stockpile. You said in 2002, before this committee, "We do know that" -- "We do know that." I understand the intelligence community never says, "We know," but you said in September, "We do know that." In October, the NIE said, "We have 100 metric tons -- 500 metric tons of chemical weapons. We found that out in the last year." Secretary Powell says, in February, "That's a conservative estimate, the stockpile 100 to 500 tons. That's a conservative estimate." KENNEDY: And then you say in March '03, "We know where they are. We know where they are." That is an extraordinary leap, and that extraordinary leap was wrong. Don't you think that that independent commission ought to be really reflective of men and women that can look hard and fast at not just what the intelligence was, but how it was manipulated, and interrogate career individuals in the intelligence community that believe that to be the case?