THIS RUMSFELD INTERVIEW IS INTERESTING, but here’s the bit that popped out to me, where he’s talking about terrorists in Iraq:
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.
I wonder which “one or two” countries we’re talking about. Well, I don’t wonder much. This is good, too:
DONALD RUMSFELD: I think so. I think we’ve had to face the vulnerabilities that are there for the 21st century. And they weren’t there in that way for us. With these two big oceans and friends North and South, we’ve had a rather protected, safe environment. With terrorists being able to get access to jet airplanes and laptops and wire transfers and all kinds of electronics, with the proliferation of technologies that relate to a chemical and biological and radiation weapons and you look forward and you think, that’s going to be a quite different world, there are two or three terrorist states that are potentially going to be nuclear powers in the next three or four, five, eight, ten, twelve years. That creates a different environment that we’re going to be living in.
JIM LEHRER: How about here?
DONALD RUMSFELD: I think that people have registered that. They’re concerned for their safety. We are free people. We don’t want to live in fear. We don’t want to be terrorized. We know there’s no way to defend against it. The only way to deal with it is to go after the terrorists where they are. We’re killing, capturing terrorists in Iraq which is a… Baghdad today which is a whale of a lot better than Boise.
Yes, it is.