Posted on 05/17/2002 7:20:27 AM PDT by Hipixs
DoD News Briefing Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld Friday, May 17, 2002 - 7:10 a.m. EDT
(NBC "Today" Interview)
Couric: On Close-up this morning, the Bush administration and the terror warnings. As we've been reporting, controversy is swirling about what the president knew about threats from al Qaeda and what could have been done about them before September 11th.
Donald Rumsfeld is the secretary of Defense. Mr. Secretary, thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Rumsfeld: Thank you.
Couric: Certainly you've heard about all the controversy, with Dick Gephardt asking what the president knew and when he knew it. Many newspapers across the country are focused on this story. What is your reaction that the Bush administration perhaps did not act quickly enough or efficaciously enough when it came to warnings that some kind of terrorist attack might occur on this country?
Rumsfeld: Well, I think, when all the dust settles, the American people will know the truth. And the truth is that every day there are numerous threat warnings -- the walk-ins off the street, pieces or scraps of intelligence collected by the FBI, pieces of information that are gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency in one way or another. And they are then looked at and sorted and sifted.
And what has to be done is to recognize that when you're all through sifting all of those, some, a very small number, prove to be actionable. That is to say, there's sufficiently specific information that someone can do something about it.
And, needless to say, when that happens, someone does do something about it and they make an effort to either alert people, which we do in the Pentagon -- for example, if we have a threat warning in the Middle East, we alert the combatant commander there, and he then puts his forces on a different alert level. And there are procedures for that taking place.
The vast majority of the reports and scraps of information that come in tend to be eventually discounted as not being valid or, at the minimum, not being actionable.
Couric: But there's some feeling, Mr. Secretary, that some warnings were not properly heeded by the powers that be; for example, the FBI memo that was written or the FBI agent who warned about people training at U.S. flight schools, about foreigners doing that back in July. There were other memos and sort of more generic CIA briefings. Should these things have been taken in toto, and should more have been done as a result of these things?
Rumsfeld: Well, I wasn't aware of the FBI information that you mentioned until it showed up in the press very recently, so I can't speak to how valid it might have been at that time. But it seems to me that the information is collected, it is collated, and judgments are made and warnings are issued.
And a great many events that would otherwise have occurred, terrorist activities, are, in fact, stopped; one very recently. We gathered some information in Afghanistan in a building that ended up stopping a terrorist act in Singapore within a matter of days thereafter, where the terrorists had planned to attack a U.S. ship, a U.S. building and a Singapore facility, and it was stopped. So there are a great many things that are stopped.
The advantage a terrorist has is a terrorist can attack at any time at any place using any conceivable technique, and it is not physically possible to defend in every place, at every moment of the day or night, against every conceivable technique. So --
Couric: But is it possible, Mr. Secretary, to have better coordination among all the agencies who might be getting these bits and pieces and scraps of information so they can join forces and prevent something like this happening in the future?
Rumsfeld: Well --
Couric: It's pretty disconcerting and unsettling that some of these warnings, albeit disparate, were surfacing prior to September 11th.
Rumsfeld: Well, you can be certain -- the American people can be certain, which is what's important, that the changes that have taken place over the past year or two -- as the threats have increased, the warnings have increased -- have been substantial and that the caution and the heightened awareness and the steps that have been taken at airports, the steps that have been taken by the FBI and the CIA, all are contributing to a safer circumstance for the American people.
But even that does not suggest that there cannot be a terrorist event somewhere, someplace in the world. And I suspect there will be. That's just the nature of the world we live in. That's why President Bush is focusing on the right thing, and that is to go after the global terrorist networks where they are and to go after the countries that are harboring those terrorists. That is really the only way to defend against terrorism.
Couric: What do you think about congressional hearings and Dick Cheney's comments that the Democrats should not make political hay with this? Because it's not just Democrats; Richard Shelby, a Republican of Alabama, talked about getting to the bottom of this yesterday on our program.
Rumsfeld: I'm not familiar with the remarks you're referring to.
Couric: Well, he basically said that an investigation was warranted to find out why more action wasn't taken.
Rumsfeld: He being the vice president?
Couric: No, this is Dick Shelby of Alabama, Senator Shelby.
Rumsfeld: Sure, he's on the Intelligence Committee, and the Congress has oversight responsibility. And certainly that's perfectly appropriate.
Couric: Let me ask you quickly about the Crusader program. The House of Representatives has already approved a $475 million budget for the Crusader program, which President Bush requested. If the Senate votes for the money, are you afraid you're going to be stuck with a weapon system you don't really want?
Rumsfeld: Well, it's happened before in history. But I think in this case it won't happen. I think that the American people recognize that it's time to transform our military, that we need to take steps.
It's always tough to cancel a weapon program. There are a lot of supporters for it -- the companies that make it, the districts it's made in. And we understand that; it's not an easy thing to do. But we intend to proceed and terminate the Crusader program. And I think, when the dust settles, that's what will happen.
Couric: All right. Well, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; again, Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for talking with us this morning. We really appreciate it.
Rumsfeld: Thank you.
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On August 6, 2001 the president received a presidential daily briefing that was an analytic report, not a warning briefing. It was an analytic report that talked about bin Laden's historic methods of operation from 1997-1998.
-Condoleezza Rice- May 16, 2001 CNN
Hold ! Enough !
Those who watch this stupid woman have evidently already seen enough of her colon !
I don't watch this stupid perky woman, so I can't testify thereto from first hand knowledge.
Boy ,oh boy did you hit the nail on the head! ROTFL BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Rumsfeld: I'm not familiar with the remarks you're referring to.
Couric: Well, he basically said that an investigation was warranted to find out why more action wasn't taken.
Rumsfeld: He being the vice president?
Couric: No, this is Dick Shelby of Alabama, Senator Shelby.
Rumsfeld: Sure, he's on the Intelligence Committee, and the Congress has oversight responsibility. And certainly that's perfectly appropriate.
Katie, Rumsfeld is a man who was analyzing geopolitical affairs while you were still trying to figure out your training bra. Try to keep that in mind, willya honey?
Ms.Couric; Richard Shelby Republican of Alabama also stated the congress had got the same briefings as the President..... Ms.Couric; isn't this selective reporting on your part
Rummy should've told her to shove it up her Butt.
The Bush administration should ignore these liberal media midgets and stop doing interviews with Democrat tainted media types, such as Katie the Cave Troll Couric.
Who directs the FBI, CIA, etc.? Who is the commander in chief? Trying to pass the blame on to Congress and Clinton is rediculous. If a company fails the CEO usually shoulders the blame because he is the guy in charge of making sure the company succeeds. He doesn’t blame the preceeding CEO or his vice-presidents. As current President, Bush must take the heat and responsibility for the failure that led to 9/11.
As for the comments that warnings like this occur every day, check out these quotes. "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon," the government's top counterterrorism official at the time, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group...
CIA Director George Tenet had been "nearly frantic" with concern since June 22, one source said. A written intelligence summary for National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on June 28: "It is highly likely that a significant al-Qaida attack is in the near future, within several weeks." By late summer, one senior political appointee said, Tenet had "repeated this so often that people got tired of hearing it."
That certainly doesn’t sound like a generic, run-of-the-mill warning.
(snip) In August 1998, the chair of the National Commission on Terrorism, Paul Bremer, wrote in the Washington Post, "The ideology of [terrorist] groups makes them impervious to political or diplomatic pressures ... We cannot seek a political solution with them." He then proposed that we, "defend ourselves. Beef up security around potential targets here and abroad….Attack the enemy. Keep up the pressure on terrorist groups. Show that we can be as systematic and relentless as they are. Crush bin Laden's operations by pressure and disruption. The U.S. government further should announce a large reward for bin Laden's capture—dead or alive."
Bremer was not alone. Given these warnings, as Andrew Sullivan observes, "Whatever excuses the Clintonites can make, they cannot argue that the threat wasn't clear, that the solution wasn't proposed, that a strategy for success hadn't been outlined. Everything necessary to prevent September 11 had been proposed in private and in public, in government reports and on op-ed pages, for eight long years. The Clinton Administration simply refused to do anything serious about the threat."
On January 20, 2001, George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States. Within months of taking office, he ordered a new strategy for combating terrorism that would be more than just "swatting at flies," as he described Clinton's policy. The new plan reached the President's desk on September 10, 2001. It was "too late," as columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote, "But it remains a fact that the new administration had devised in eight months a strategy that Bill Clinton had delayed for eight years." (/snip)
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