Rumsfeld Warns of Iran, N. Korea Electromagnetic Pulse Attack
Sunday, 13 Feb 2011 09:23 AM
By Ken Timmerman
Former Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld’s new memoir, “Known
and Unknown,” sets
the record straight on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction
and warns of impending dangers from countries such as Iran and
North Korea.
During an interview with Newsmax.TV, Rumsfeld vigorously
defended the George W. Bush administration’s judgment of the
threat from Saddam and blasted critics who accused the president
of lying about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The
interview took place shortly after he received the prestigious
Defender of the Constitution award Thursday from the
Conservative Political Action Conference during the annual
conference in Washington, D.C.
Rumsfeld castigated the Democrats who used the taunt of “Bush
lied, people died” as their mantra during the 2004 presidential
campaign.
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video.
“It was an outrageous statement,” he said. “It was so
inaccurate. President Bush and Colin Powell and Condi Rice and
the vice president and George Tenet and I believed fully in what
we said. And to suggest that the president of the United States
was lying is inexcusable.”
But “the drumbeat was too powerful” for the White House to push
back successfully against its critics, he added.
Rumsfeld said he and his colleagues “were saying exactly what
the people in the Congress were saying who saw exactly the same
intelligence. They were saying what the intelligence community
was saying. They were saying what the intelligence community in
other countries such as the U.K., France, and elsewhere
believed. It was unfortunate that the lies overwhelmed the
truth.”
In his book, Rumsfeld wrote that the failure of the Bush White
House to counter “half-truths, distortions and outright lies” in
the national media allowed the president’s political enemies to
write the narrative of his administration.
And yet, he had no real explanation of why the administration
didn’t push back harder.
“Oh, one never knows,” he said. “First, it’s hard” to push back
effectively.
Rumsfeld credited the forces of political correctness with
powers that exceeded the truth of their ideas.
Whenever administration officials talked about the threat from
radical Islamists, he said, “their views are seen as
anti-Muslim, which is not true.”
And when the administration opposed Muslim terrorists overseas,
it was accused of being “against that Muslim faith, which you
are not.”
“What we’re against is people who are going around killing other
people, other innocent human beings. And we ought to be willing
to say that. We ought to be willing to say there are radical
Islamists who are out to damage the nation state, to kill
innocent human beings, and we ought not to allow them to do it,”
he said.
Rumsfeld said he opted not to write a “quick” book about his
tenure in the Bush administration in favor of writing a detailed
historical account “aimed at serious readers and people really
interested in government and public affairs.”
With a staff of six aides, Rumsfeld got the government to
release reams of previously classified memos, including many of
his famous “snowflakes” to aides and colleagues.
He said he wants history to judge him accurately, which is why
he has posted these documents in searchable format at his
website, Rumsfeld.com.
Rumsfeld said he is worried about the threat from an
electromagnetic pulse attack from countries such as Iran and
North Korea.
“We’ve thrown away the shoeboxes with the 3-by-5 cards,” he
said, “so that cyberwarfare, and electromagnetic pulses and the
things that can avoid competition with large armies and large
navies and large air forces clearly have leverage, an advantage.
And because of that, they’re attractive” to America’s enemies.
In his memoir, Rumsfeld says he repeatedly tried to get the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and the White House to pay more attention
to the threat from Iran, without success.
At one point, he forwarded to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, a news article and a National
Intelligence Council paper detailing Iran’s “lethal support” for
militants attacking U.S. troops in Iraq. “If we know so much
about what Iran is doing in Iraq, why don't we do something
about it?” he asked Pace.
“When you have a country like Iran, really a fine country with a
proud history, taken over by a very small clique of people who
are ideological and radical, you have to worry,” he said. “And
we in this country, and other people who value freedom and free
nation states, have to recognize that that combination of
radical ideology and weapons of mass destruction is a danger.”