Rumsfeld Gets Nailed

Yesterday in Atlanta before a mostly friendly audience, Ray McGovern, a retired 27-year veteran CIA analyst, asked Secretary Donald Rumsfeld some tough questions in a recent news conference. You can watch the video here, and this is is my best effort at a transcript of the events, a little better, I think, than what is transcribed in the link above:

MCGOVERN:
Sir, I would like to ask you to be up front with the American people, why did you lie to get us into a war that that was not necessary that caused these kind of casualties? Why?

RUMSFELD:
Well, first of all, I haven’t lied. I did not lie then. (Applause) Colin Powell didn’t lie. He spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence Agency people and prepared a presentation that I know he believed was accurate, and he presented that to the United Nations. The president spent weeks and weeks with the Central Intelligence people. And he went to the American people and made a presentation. I'm not in the intelligence business. They gave the world their honest opinion. It appears that there were not weapons of mass destruction there.

MCGOVERN:
You said you knew where they were.

RUMSFELD:
I did not. I said I knew where suspect sites were and –

MCGOVERN:
You said you knew where they were — near Tikrit, near Baghdad, northeast, south, west of there. Those are your words.

RUMSFELD:
(Flustered) My words — my words were that — (to security guards) no, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let him stay one second. Just a second.

MCGOVERN:
This is America.

(Applause)

RUMSFELD:
You’re getting plenty of play, sir.

MCGOVERN:
I’d just like an honest answer.

RUMSFELD:
I’m giving it to you.

MCGOVERN:
Well we’re talking about lies and your allegation there was "bulletproof evidence "of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. Is that a lie, or were you misled?

RUMSFELD:
Zarqawi was in Baghdad during the prewar period. That is a fact.

MCGOVERN:
Zarqawi? He was in the north of Iraq in a place where Saddam Hussein had no rule. That’s also…

RUMSFELD:
Yes he was. He was also in Baghdad.

MCGOVERN:
Yes, when he needed to go to the hospital. Come on, these people aren’t idiots. They know the story.

RUMSFELD:
You are... (pauses) Let me give you an example. It’s easy for you to make a charge, but why do you think that the men and women in uniform every day, when they came out of Kuwait and went into Iraq, put on chemical weapon protective suits? Because they liked the style? (Laughter.) They honestly believed that there were chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people previously; he'd used them on his neighbors the Iranians, and they believed he had those weapons. We believed he had those weapons.

MCGOVERN:
That’s what we call a non sequitur. It doesn’t matter what the troops believe; it matters what you believe.

At this point, the moderator of the session cut off McGovern so that other people in the audience could ask other questions. Rumsfeld was visibly upset with the challenge although he did his best to keep his cool.

Rumsfeld was right about the belief that Hussein had chemical weapons. But McGovern was right about Rumsfeld's statements regarding the WMD's -- he made those statements to George Stephanophoulos on March 30, 2003: "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." (Near the bottom of the link). And it's also true that Rumsfeld has claimed that firearms novice Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi's visit to Baghdad in May of 2002 to seek medical care was "bulletproof" evidence of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and now the Administration seems to be backing away from that claim.

So as for McGovern calling Rumsfeld out on his prior statements, well, McGovern has the facts on his side. In the law business, we call this sort of thing "impeachment by prior inconsistent statements." This is a successful impeachment, in my book. But being impeached is not exactly the same thing as being caught in a lie -- a "lie," after all, is an intentional untruth. We know now that what Rumsfeld said in 2002 and 2003 was incorrect. But, did Rumsfeld lie or not?

I know that things looked different back in 2002 and 2003 than they do now, and that hindsight permits not only more facts to be considered but also a substantially less emotional atmosphere to weigh options that could have been. To give Rumsfeld and the rest of the administration the benefit of the doubt that they believed everything they said in good faith is to render the substantial part of the information that we based our decision to go to war on a tissue of fiction, conjecture, and incompetence. Perhaps our leaders didn't "lie" to us in the sense that they knew what they were saying was untrue. But the only other way I can reconcile the information we have now with what we were told then is that a mistake of colossal proportions was made.

It's no defense to that mistake to say that we're better off now with Saddam out of power and an uncertain future for Iraq. I'm not at all sure that's the case -- if Iraq descends into a militant Muslim theocracy with overt hostility to the U.S. (like several of its next-door neighbors), as seems to be a likely scenario even if a democratic government is created -- then it's hard for me to understand exactly how we're better off in the endgame than we were in the opening plays.