stevenberlinjohnson.com: Rumsfeld Faces The Nation, And Stammers
Donald Rumsfield is learning that if you make enough really bad decisions and then later lie about them in public to cover them up, the lies eventually come back to haunt you. During an interview on “Face the Nation” Rumsfeld choked out a denial that he or the President or anyone he knew in the administration had said Iraq posed an immediate threat before we invaded the country.
SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?
Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you’re the–you and a few other critics are the only people I’ve heard use the phrase “immediate threat.” I didn’t. The president didn’t. And it’s become kind of folklore that that’s–that’s what’s happened. The president went…
Unfortunately for Rumsfeld, Thomas Friedman had a quote from Rumsfeld catching him in a lie.
Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says “some have argued that the nu”–this is you speaking–“that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.”
and continuing with the quote from Rumsfeld…
Mr. FRIEDMAN: “No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.”
Rumsfeld stammered out a final defense in a manner that made even Bush sound eloquent.
Sec. RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It–my view of–of the situation was that he–he had–we–we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that–that we believed and we still do not know–we will know.
Okay, that’s fine. It’s well known now that the administration relied on what turned out to be bad intelligence to justify invading Iraq. Maybe you really did believe it at the time. It appears you definitely wanted to believe it. But if you screwed up, just admit it. Don’t keep lying about it. If you won’t listen to me, go ask Martha about what happens when you lie about bad decisions.
Rumsfeld then mentioned David Kay’s statement that we are only about 85% of the way through our search for WMDs. Ooooh, bad move, Donald. That invited Scheiffer to introduce a recent quote from Kay.
SCHIEFFER: ‘The president should say, “We were simply mistaken and we’re determined to find out why” and he said ‘Until we say that, it’s going to hurt American credibility and delay reforms in intelligence which simply need to be done.’
I fear Rumsfeld and his buddies are going to treat the search for WMDs like a search for space aliens. You can’t prove that they don’t exist. If you don’t find them, that just means you haven’t looked long or hard enough.
The CBS News website provides the full transcript of Rumsfeld’s interview.