JIM LEHRER: First, today’s news about this Osama bin Laden tape. What do you make of that and the threat he made for more attacks even worse than the ones we had two years ago?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, the al-Qaida has been put under enormous pressure. A good many of them have been captured or killed. Their ability to function has been significantly affected. They’re still dangerous. No question about that. They can still conduct attacks, but what we’ve seen since we moved them out of Afghanistan and took away the Taliban from Afghanistan, running that country, the pattern has been that every period of months they’ll come out with an audiotape or a videotape. And I’m not an expert on this, and I haven’t seen this particular tape. But the general feeling in the government is that what they’re doing is trying to pretend that they’re functioning well, leave the impression that people should give them money, their financiers, leave the impression that they’re a viable organization and that they should get recruits and just generally give encouragement to their people. Of course, the purpose... they’re terrorists, and the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. So by using an information operations campaign like this, they are hoping also to terrorize people and frighten them.

JIM LEHRER: It must be awfully galling to you though to think that this guy might be alive out there somewhere.
DONALD RUMSFELD: No.

JIM LEHRER: No?
DONALD RUMSFELD: No, not really, no. If you think about it, it’s very hard to find a single individual. We haven’t found Mullah Omar; we haven’t found Saddam Hussein. Now, we’ve found something like 42 out of the top 55 in Iraq, which is good. And some of them turned themselves in I should point out. But think how long people are on the FBI’s most wanted list. Some are on there ten years, fifteen years.

JIM LEHRER: Now, two questions. Let’s start at the end and work back. Why can’t our forces stop these people, these foreign types from coming into Iraq?
DONALD RUMSFELD: Well, that’s like asking do you think our borders with Mexico and Canada are sealed or are they porous? Do people move back and forth across them that we don’t know about?

JIM LEHRER: Now Mr. Secretary, you know that’s not a good analogy, the United States and Canada.
DONALD RUMSFELD: The United States and Mexico. I mean it’s a border is a problem.

JIM LEHRER: And they’ve come to cause trouble and to kill people.
DONALD RUMSFELD: Sure. We’ve scooped them up and arrested them and killed them. There’s something in excess of 100 just from one or two countries. And we’ve got that many that have been captured and killed. And some of them have in their... they have money that they’ve been given to do this. They’ve got leaflets that recruited them.
Just like we thought, Rummy’s been keeping score. Just one more:

JIM LEHRER: Rightly or wrongly, Mr. Secretary, I went back and checked the record today, the impression that was given in public statements and all that sort of thing was that when this war ended, this war was going to end, that when Saddam Hussein and his regime, you know, fell, then the rest of it was going to be kind of a mop-up. And I’m just --
DONALD RUMSFELD: Not by me.