Rumsfeld's speech was not about weapons of mass destruction. It was about the challenges facing Iraqi reconstruction. However, he must have known WMD would have come up in the question-answer period, yet his answers to those questions were strangely incoherent. For instance: "We had facts. We knew the Iraqis used chemical weapons against the Iranians. We had facts. We know they used chemical weapons against their own population and killed thousands, tens of thousands with chemical weapons." (This, of course, is not in dispute, but it happened a long time ago, before the U.N. inspectors—those put on the ground after the '91 war—destroyed huge vats of the stuff and the Iraqis said, truthfully or untruthfully, that they themselves destroyed the rest.) He went on: "Second, we had intelligence, information, people chatting with each other about 'Don't mention the word, don't say that.' " He's referring to the tapes of intercepted phone conversations, which Colin Powell played at his Feb. 5 Security Council briefing. In them, one Iraqi officer tells another that he's gotten rid of something before the inspectors pay him a visit. Another officer gives an order to stop using the word "nerve agent" in wireless conversations. I too thought those intercepts were very persuasive, but I figured they were just tips of the iceberg—a couple of glimpses representing a vast cache of intelligence information that couldn't be released, for fear that Saddam might kill the sources. I'm a bit stunned that, though the war is over and Saddam long gone, Rumsfeld is still citing this tape as the main evidence. He doesn't have anything better?