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EFL - I havenât been through the how transcript, but it was released on Friday by the DOD. (Interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post. Also participating was Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Lawrence Di Rita and the Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Lt. Gen. John Craddock) Rumsfeld: Iâve told you before that my memory tends to go toward concepts, principles and approaches as opposed to details, so if there are factual differences at anything I say, alert us and weâll check them. And theyâve got a timeline that Tom Franks had. Q: Ah thatâs great. Rumsfeld: No. And---yes, weâll make it available to the President or people youâre going to interview so theyâll know what. And youâve seen Franks, Renuart, Luck, Myers, Pace and Giambastiani. Q: Your predecessor, yes sir. Rumsfeld: Let me just open with a couple of comments. I do not remember much about Iraq being discussed at all with the President or me or the NSC prior to when the President asked me to â asked me what I thought of the Iraq contingency plan. That I believe was November 21st of â01. Q: Thatâs great to pin that date down. That makes sense. Rumsfeld: It feels right to me because I believe I talked to Tom Franks on the -- he thinks on the 27th. Di Rita: Yes sir, thatâs right, when you went down to Tampa, you had a press conference that day and I think you spent an hour with General Franks. Rumsfeld: And I would not have waited long from the President asking me to do it when he asked me what I thought of the war plan -- the contingency plan -- and I told him that I didnât think it was current, that I didnât think it represented Tom Franksâ thinking. That I knew it didnât represent mine and that it was basically Desert Storm II Plus and that I thought we could â that I was in the process of reviewing all of the contingency plans in the department and had been since earlier in â01. And he asked if I could do it on a basis that wasnât, you know, terribly noticeable, and I said sure, because Iâm doing all of them. I was uncomfortable with many of them sufficiently enough that after I reviewed two, I stopped everything and had a whole Saturday blocked out. Q: Either August 1st or August 8th. Rumsfeld: To go through all the assumptions in all of the key plans. Did I mention this? Q: This is â Rumsfeld: And I wanted to hear if the ones I saw had assumptions that I knew were stale, then I better see them all, and I did. Q: And this â you told this to the President on this November 21st when he took you aside after an NSC meeting? Rumsfeld: What he did was at the end of an NSC meeting he said, I need to see you. We walked out and went in a little cubby hole office right off the NSC Situation Room, closed the door and he said, how do you feel about the plan â the war plan for Iraq? I said what I said. And I then answered him with what I had done and where we were, and I said that there isnât a combatant commander who doesnât know how I feel and that Iâm getting them refreshed. Q: So you could do this under the radar so to speak. Rumsfeld: Yeah. Which I was doing with the others. Q: Did he say anything else in terms of urgency? Rumsfeld: No. There wasnât any urgency, and the only thing he asked me was not to talk about it with other people, and I said, well it would be helpful for me to be able to know who I can talk to when he had brought other people into his thinking. And I said itâs particularly important that I talk to George Tenet on things like this. And he said, fine, and at a later date he did tell me that I could talk to Tenet. Q: But not at that point? Rumsfeld: No, because he had not talked to Tenet. He had not talked to anybody that I know of -- he left me with that impression. The discussions on Iraq preceding that, and subsequent to that, had been basically on Operation Northern Watch and Southern Watch and I think I mentioned to you that we had a plan for a downed aircraft called Desert Badger. And that I was uncomfortable with the fact that our planes were being shot at and we werenât able to do much about it under the constraints that existed. I was also uncomfortable with Desert Badger, and I thought the President ought to have additional options, so I told him that I was going to see if we could pre-package some additional options, and we ended up pre-packaging a Desert Badger Plus and a Desert Badger Plus Plus. So that he knew about it, and that in the event a plane went down, I could call him and recommend one of those three. Q: This had all been done before 9/11 even or before --? Rumsfeld: Desert Badger existed prior to 9/11. Q: And the Plus Plus? Rumsfeld: And the Plus Plus we fashioned afterwards. It would have been. Now what do you have? Q: Well Iâve gone through this in lots of detail with people and Iâm looking for the story of him and you -- the President and you -- dealing on this, and clearly General Franks brought up a number of iterations of this December 4th, December 12th -- I think itâs in the list -- and then there was the briefing in Crawford that he gave the President on December 28th. You were at your place and you were on video that day I understand? Rumsfeld: I donât think so. Di Rita: We do have a video of you on SVTC [Secure Video Teleconference] that day from your place. Rumsfeld [to staff]: Oh, do you? Okay. [to Woodward] There was a time that I suggested that Tom go down alone. Q: That was it. Rumsfeld: And I wanted him to spend some time with the President because I felt it was important that the President develop a confidence level that I had in Tom. And I thought it would be an easier thing to do if I werenât there. So I purposely stayed away from one of the meetings in Crawford and I asked Tom to go physically rather than by SVTC. I said I thought it would be a good idea. .... Posted by: Super Hose 2004-04-20 |
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