Washington ? Defending the war against Iraq, the Bush administration said Wednesday that information on Saddam Hussein’s alleged illicit weapons programs was solid even though one of President Bush’s claims was based on a forgery.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the administration decided to use force in Iraq because intelligence about the threat of Saddam’s rule was seen in a different perspective after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

“The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass murder,” Rumsfeld said while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We acted because we saw the existing evidence in a new light through the prism of our experience on Sept. 11.”

Rumsfeld was asked about President Bush’s prewar claim, now known to be based on faulty evidence, that Iraq had sought uranium from Africa before the war. Rumsfeld said one erroneous report did not invalidate the body of intelligence used to justify going to war.

“I think the intelligence has been quite good, and I don’t think the fact that there’s an instance where something was inaccurate ought to in any way paint a broad brush on the intelligence that we get and suggest that that’s a pattern or something. It’s not,” Rumsfeld said.

Speaking in South Africa, Bush also predicted that proof of Saddam’s weapons programs would yet be found. More than two months of searching in postwar Iraq have turned up little that would validate his assertions that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and a program to develop nuclear weapons.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that when it’s all said and done the facts will show the world the truth,” Bush said in Pretoria. “There’s going to be, you know, a lot of attempts to try to rewrite history, and I can understand that. But I’m absolutely confident in the decision I made.”

Bush did not address his assertion, made during his State of the Union speech in January, that Saddam had sought uranium from Africa. That statement rested largely on documents, alleging contacts between officials in Iraq and Niger, that were later determined to be forgeries.

In other Iraq-related news:

• A suburban Chicago publisher of a small Arabic-language newspaper, Khaled Abdel-Latif Dumeisi, 60, was arrested Wednesday on charges he acted as a paid agent of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service, tipping off Iraqi spies to the activities of Iraqi opposition leaders living in the United States.
• Iraq’s former interior minister was arrested by U.S. forces, while a top-level Baath party official surrendered, the latest arrests from a list of 55 most-wanted fugitives from Saddam Hussein’s ousted regime.

Thirty-four of those on the list have now been detained, the U.S. Central Command said Wednesday.

Mizban Khadr Hadi, a high-ranking member of the Baath party regional command and No. 23 on the U.S. most-wanted list, surrendered in Baghdad. Mahmud Diab al-Ahmed was No. 29.