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4:52pm (UK)
Rumsfeld Compares Baghdad Looters to Football Hooligans
By Tom Kelly, PA News, in New York
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has compared the looters in Baghdad to English football hooligans.
Mr Rumsfeld claimed reports of lawlessness in Iraq since the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime had been exaggerated.
“Think of all the looting that took place after the earthquake in Turkey, remember what happened after the riots in Los Angeles,” he said in a speech to a New York thinktank.
“We know what happens at a soccer game in England.”
Mr Rumsfeld also suggested publicly for the first time that there may not be any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
He said the leaders of Saddam’s regime may have “decided that they would destroy the WMD prior to a conflict“.
This would explain why allied troops had not faced chemical, biological or nuclear arms during the invasion.
His remarks are the latest indication that the Bush administration is retreating from its claim that Saddam had an active illegal weapons programme, which was cited as the main justification for the attack.
Seven weeks of intensive searching by nearly 2,000 American troops have failed to produce any firm evidence of banned arms.
Mr Rumsfeld said: “It’s hard to find things in a country that’s determined not to have you find them.
“I suspect we’ll learn a lot more as we go along and keep interrogating people.”
But Joseph Cirincione, from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said the Bush administration was looking for excuses.
He told the New York Times: “It’s impossible to destroy or hide the quantities the administration said they had without our noticing it.”
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