It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat. Second, the criminal facilities, there are dozens of them, it's a large geographic area.
Note that this can be parsed (can you say "parse"? It's our Word for the Day!) as the bolded parts all being synonymous. Yes, it's not the best phrasing - under this reading he uses "area" in two different contexts: (1) small locations where the weapons were (note the past tense - that whole parsing thing again) and (2) large geographical regions. And I understand how that can cause you confusion, what with your inability to recognize identical paragraphs and all. But it reads correctly and consistently that way, and every alternative reading has MORE problems, unless you artificially crop part of the statement. Now, why would people keep consistently cropping his statement at a particular point? Hmm....
He's claiming he knew where the WMD's were, but that they might be gone by the time they get there.
It's time for another lesson in parsing, children! What's our lesson for today? The present vs. the future! Let's take a look at the sentence you refer to, shall we?
"So there may be nothing left."
Does that refer to the future, or the present? Well, by golly, it's ambiguous! You could say "So there may be nothing left right now" (present) or you could say "So there may be nothing left by the time we arrive" (future). My god! Rumsfeld was ambiguous, therefore he lied!
That's a pretty damned unconvincing argument. It's entirely possible to read that sentence as referring to the present. In fact, in context (it's an important word, too), it's more likely to refer to the present, since the activities he believes might have moved the WMD's had ALREADY HAPPENED! He said,
"I would also add, we saw from the air that there
were dozens of trucks that
went into that facility after the existence of it became public in the press and they
moved things out."
The verb tense on that part is NOT ambiguous, and implies rather strongly that his uncertainty about the location of WMD's does, indeed, extent to their location at the time he made his statements.
You can't tell the difference between references to the past, present, or future, you can't notice duplicate paragraphs, you can't understand how pronouns can be read as referring to multiple different concepts.
If Rummy didn't lie, there would be no need for apologists such as yourself to try and convince us that he didn't.
That doesn't logically follow. If Rumsfeld did lie, then I'm an apologist, sure. But if Rumsfeld didn't lie, then you're just an obsessive loon, and I'm trying to open your eyes to the truth. Jeeze, do I have to spell out EVERYTHING for you?