[MississippiMan]

I don't remember Rumsfeld's earlier denial, so I'm basing it strictly on the transcript above, which is far from a hard denial. "I don't believe it" is a far cry from "it did not happen," and you can rest assured that Rumsfeld knows what's happening over there right now, especially something of this magnitude. And he qualified it by saying he knew of no major exodus, which left wriggle room. I'm no fan of the author, but I also don't believe in automatically discounting EVERYTHING reported if it can be seen as negative to the administration in any way. I believe we must be objective. If not, we're no different than the liberals who toe the party line.

MM

[vbmoneyspender]

At the beginning of this war, Rumsfeld said that he wouldn't lie. After the war began and these reports started surfacing from the Indian press about a month and a half ago, Rumsfeld was asked about the reports and he said that they had been checked into and that our people couldn't find any basis for concluding that the reports were true. Rumsfeld then said, repeatedly, that he didn't believe the reports were true. For people who speak plain English like Rumsfeld does, that constitutes a denial.

However, what you are asking for Rumsfeld to do is say that he has perfect knowledge of everything that has happened in Afghanistan since the war and (based on that perfect knowledge) to then guarantee that nothing like this happened. Because Rumsfeld is a smart guy, he is not going to do that because it is possible (albeit highly unlikely) that some helicopter survived our blitz and was able to get people out of Afghanistan without our knowledge.

All Rumsfeld is going to say (and all that should be expected of him to say) is that as far as the U.S. military knows, nothing like this happened. Given Rumsfeld's track record of not lying, versus Hersh's record of affirmative lies, that should be good enough for reasonable people to conclude that nothing even remotely similar to what Hersh is reporting actually happened.

Plus, how in the world does anybody believe that something like this could be kept a secret for over 2 months time. Does anybody really seriously think that an air corridor could be created so that several thousand Al Queda-affiliated enemies could be flown out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan and nobody in the military would say anything about this. That all of our people fighting the war in Afghanistan would just sit by and not say anything to a reporter they respected, like Bill Gertz, about something stupid like this being allowed to take place. Finally, ask yourself this. How is that Hersh, who has always despised that U.S. military, keeps getting people in the military (including SF) to divulge our nation's deepest, darkest military secrets to him. It strikes me as being very strange that Hersh keeps getting 'scoops' that no one else is ever able to confirm.