Rumsfeld won't give up on WMD

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not ready to conclude that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction before US troops invaded to depose him last year.

The arch-hawk told the Senate Armed Services Committee today 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.