| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| Woody’ |
| 2004-04-20 |
| EFL - I haven’t 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: I’ve 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 we’ll check them. And they’ve got a timeline that Tom Franks had. Q: Ah that’s great. Rumsfeld: No. And---yes, we’ll make it available to the President or people you’re going to interview so they’ll know what. And you’ve 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 – asked me what I thought of the Iraq contingency plan. That I believe was November 21st of ‘01. Q: That’s 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, that’s 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 didn’t think it was current, that I didn’t think it represented Tom Franks’ thinking. That I knew it didn’t represent mine and that it was basically Desert Storm II Plus and that I thought we could – that I was in the process of reviewing all of the contingency plans in the department and had been since earlier in ‘01. And he asked if I could do it on a basis that wasn’t, you know, terribly noticeable, and I said sure, because I’m 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 – 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 – 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 – 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 isn’t a combatant commander who doesn’t know how I feel and that I’m 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 wasn’t 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 it’s 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 weren’t 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 I’ve gone through this in lots of detail with people and I’m 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 it’s 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 don’t 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 weren’t 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 |
| #4 for Dem talking points....c'mon Barb - that was a softball |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-04-20 7:18:09 PM |
| #3 RC - you mean someone actually reads his books? Why? |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2004-04-20 7:04:23 PM |
| #2 Damn. Woodward's gotta hate it when people release the raw material he ignores when he writes his books. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-04-20 8:23:55 AM |
| #1 At the very end it became apparent to me that Rumsfeld knew the Woodward was up to no good and was plying with Bob like he was a cat toy. Here is some of the tail end of their Q&A: Q: Is the president a friend? Do you consider him a friend? I mean it’s one of the Greeks who always said there are three kinds of friends, the ones you have good time, enjoy things with; the other were useful, business, professional; and then the other one is one kind of a complete friendship and you get one or two of those in your life. Rumsfeld: I don’t think of it quite that way. I didn’t know him as well at all when I came here. I briefed him a number of times during his presidential campaign but we’re you know, I’m closer to his father’s generation than his. He is a person that when you get home at night and Joyce says – well or Joyce is with him, we go to a movie with them at the White House and have dinner or something or a function and we’ll come home and the two of us will look at each other and say isn’t that just a delight to be working with a person who is that way, who is that straight forward, that open, that comfortable with himself, that rooted -- that has that confidence, courage I guess the words you’ve used. And we smile to each other and say isn’t that – Donald also lets Bob know that Joyce and he saw Blackhawk Down and Chicago with the first couple at teh White House. If there isn't already a Rummy Fan Club, then there ought to be one. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-04-20 1:19:29 AM |