ON EDIT-Added Gen.Newbold's first name.
I watched "Rumsfeld's Rules" last Thursday night and was waiting to see the quote from Marine Lt. General Greg Newbold, sure enough was there but the next day I couldn't find it on the Primetime Live site. This link is from the US military itself which posted the ENTIRE transcript, ABC (link below) scrubbed it from their site.
See the General's statements as well as former Army Secretary ( and Enron exec.) Thomas White. This is really good e-mail stuff and needs to be fed to the networks and papers.
http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040325-secdef0566.htmlMR. MCWETHY: According to Newbold and others, the secretary bullied many in uniform, even four star generals and admirals, as he led the Bush administration’s charge toward war. Iraq, he said, was armed with weapons of mass destruction and Iraq was a haven for the very same terrorist group that attacked the U.S. on September 11th.
SEC. RUMSFELD: (From tape.) If you’re asking are there al Qaeda in Iraq, the answer is yes there are. It’s a fact.
THOMAS WHITE (FORMER SECRETARY OF THE ARMY): It clearly was a war of choice. We had not been able to establish that there was an imminent threat.
MS. MATTHEWS: The threat was certainly distorted and exaggerated in dozens and dozens and dozens of statements from the president on down.
MR. MCWETHY: Critics say that you and your advisors exaggerated the importance of the intelligence prior to going into Iraq. Yes? No?
SEC. RUMSFELD: False. When I spoke, I quoted generally public unclassified Central Intelligence Agency analysis and you’ll find my remarks are not terribly – (audio break) – came out of people in the past administration who said essentially the same things.
MR. CLARKE: The question is, was there an imminent threat to the United States? And the intelligence did not support that.
GEN. NEWBOLD: I think Saddam Hussein was a paper tiger. MR. MCWETHY: As operations director for the Joint Chiefs, General Greg Newbold saw nearly all of the intelligence reports. He and others were troubled by how some of Rumsfeld’s top sides were spinning the information.
GEN. NEWBOLD: They argued that all the things they saw meant that Saddam Hussein was a imminent threat to the United States, a principal reason for the terrorism against the United States, and had to be taken out.
MR. MCWETHY: General Newbold was not alone in questioning the case for war.
GEN. NEWBOLD: It’s fair to say that there were a lot of reflections by senior military leaders as to the rationale because a lot of it was not obvious to them.
MR. MCWETHY: But they obeyed as Rumsfeld dictated details of the invasion plan starting with exactly which troops would go and exactly when they would leave. The Pentagon calls it deployment.
MR. WHITE: The deployment scheme was micromanaged by the secretary and that – and that caused an enormous amount of pain on the Army side.
MR. MCWETHY: At the time, Thomas White was secretary of the army. He’s one of the few top Bush administration officials willing to criticize the powerful secretary of defense. White charges that Rumsfeld’s interference caused troops to arrive in Iraq without equipment and crucial support units to be weeks late in getting there. Rumsfeld argues he was just following another of his rules: reserve the right to get into anything, and exercise it.
SEC. RUMSFELD: Did it disrupt what people had fixed in their mind as the way it should be done? Sure it did. But it happens what they had fixed in their mind was flat wrong. It wasn’t the way it should have been done and it’s not the way it will ever be done again, and if there are people who are disturbed about that, so be it.
MR. WHITE: Well, I would argue he was not part of the cure, he was part of the problem.
From ABC News Primetime Live site ("paper tiger" comment missing)See page 3:
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/Primetime/World/donald_rumsfeld_040325-3.html
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