Washington: US Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld said today (Feb 04, 2004) that he is not ready to conclude that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) before US troops invaded to depose him last year.

Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that US weapons inspectors need more time to reach final conclusions about whether chemical and biological weapons existed in Iraq before the war, as the Bush administration had asserted before sending American troops into battle.

In a prepared statement, Rumsfeld said he was confident that prewar intelligence, while possibly flawed in some respects, was not manipulated by the administration to justify its war aims.

In his first public comments on the subject since David Kay told the Congress last week that he believed it was now clear that US intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs was fundamentally flawed, Rumsfeld praised the efforts of US intelligence agencies and stressed the difficulty of penetrating secretive societies like Iraq.

Rumsfeld offered several examples of what he called "alternative views" about why no weapons have been discovered in Iraq, starting with the possibility that banned Arms never existed.

"I suppose that's possible, but not likely," he said.