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Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: Tim Russert asks “Do you ever say to yourself, or wonder ‘My god, the intelligence information was wrong and what have we gotten ourselves into?'”

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Rummy’s answer: “You know, in my lifetime, I’ve said that many times…” (See complete answer below.)
Russert also asks Rummy about Saddam’s current role, if any, in the latest wave of attacks on the troops.
This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Complete Video and Photos
Russert to Rumsfeld: Do you ever say to yourself, or wonder ‘My god, the intelligence information was wrong and what have we gotten ourselves into?’ (Small – 6 MB)
Tim Russert:
“Do you ever say to yourself, or wonder ‘My god, the intelligence information was wrong and what have we gotten ourselves into?’ ”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“You know, in my lifetime, I’ve said that many times, because intelligence is never really ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ What it is is a best effort by wonderful, hard working intelligence people, overtly and covertly trying to gather in the best information they can and then present it to policy makers. It’s never perfect. These countries are closed societies. They make a point of denying and deceiving so that you can’t know what they’re doing. So it’s a best effort, and it’s pretty good. Is it perfect? No. Has it ever been perfect? No. It will never be perfect, our intelligence information. But we’ve got wonderful people doing a fine job and it seems to me that it’s adequate for policy makers to then look at it and draw conclusions and make judgements.”
Tim Russert:
“Do you think that Saddam Hussein intentionally rolled over in March, and let the United States roar into Baghdad, planning that he would come back six months later with an armed resistance of the nature we’re seeing now?
Donald Rumsfeld:
“I don’t. I think they fought hard south. When the movement was so fast. And then, when some forces came in from north, a great many of his forces decided that they couldn’t handle it, and they disappeared. They disband themselves, if you will, left their weapons in some instances and unformed their formations, and went home. The idea that his plan was to do that I think is far fetched. What role he’s playing today, I don’t know. We don’t know. Very likely, Saddam Hussein is alive. Very likely, he’s in the country. His sons are killed. 42 of his top lieutenants, out of 55, have been captured or killed. So it’s a skinny-downed organization, what’s left. And, uh, is he interested in retaking his country? Sure. Is he going to? No. Not a chance.”

Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: Were We Safer Before The War?

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Tim Russert asks a great question and Rummy manages to drop in a little disinformation about the non-existent connection between Al Queda and Iraq.
This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Complete Video and Photos
Rumsfeld On Whether We’re Less Safe Since The Shrub War Started
 (Small – 8 MB)
Tim Russert:
“Go back prior to the war in march, where the argument was being made that there was no need to go to war with Saddam Hussein. He’s in a box. He’s confined. We have sanctions. We have inspections. And then the Administration decided to go to war and opened up that box. And that America is now less safe — less secure, than we were prior to the invasion.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“I think that that’s not correct. I would say America is more safe today. If you believe the intelligence, which successive administrations of both political parties did, and other governments in the world, that he was progressing with these programs and that this is a country who’s used the weapons before. That’s used them on its neighbors — used them on his own people. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the tapes more recently of what they do to their own people. Of cutting off people’s heads and cutting off their fingers and their hands, and pulling out their tongues and cutting them off — throwing them off three story buildings. This is a particularly vicious regime, Saddam’s regime.
It is true, we have terrific young men and women being killed and wounded today, as we did yesterday, and your heart goes out to their families and to their loved ones. But what they’re doing is important. What they’re doing is taking the battle to the terrorists. There are foreign terrorists coming in to Iraq. That’s true. We know that. We’ve captured two or three hundered of them from various countries.”
Tim Russert:
“Stop there. Would that have happened — would they have gone to Iraq but for the fact that we went in there?”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Why sure. The Ansur al islam (sp) was already in Iraq. There were Al Quaeda already in Iraq. The Iraqis were engaged in terrorism themselves. They were giving $25,000 to suicide bombers’ families who would go in and kill innocent men, women and children. They are a part of that. And certainly, the work in Iraq is difficult. It’s tough. And it is gonna to take some time, but good progress is being made in many parts of the country…”

Rumsfeld On Meet The Press: What Did He Mean When He Said The Coalition Could Win The Shrub War “One Way Or The Other” In His Memo?

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This is from the November 2, 2003 program of Meet the Press.
Complete Video and Photos
Rumsfeld: One Way Or The Other (Small – 3 MB)
Tim Russert:
“You also reference to ‘the coalition can win Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or the other.’ What did you mean by that?”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Oh, that it is (stops) We’re on a track, and we hope the track works, and I believe it is working. You take Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai and Loya Jirga have produced a bonn plan — a way ahead. It’s underway. Uh, will it stay on track exactly? I don’t know. I hope so. I think they’re doing a good job and we’re doing everything we can to help them and so are a lot of other countries, including NATO now. Um, but, but however that sorts out one way or another, that country is not gonna go back and become a terrorist training ground for the Al Queda.”
Tim Russert:
“That appears to be a much more pessimistic assessment than you have made publicly.”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Not at all. I believe we’re doing well in Afghanistan, and said so.”
Tim Russert:
“And Iraq?”
Donald Rumsfeld:
“Well, I was gonna come to Iraq. Iraq is what it is. It is a tough, difficult situation. When you’re having people killed in the coalition, and we are, and our Iraqi allies being killed that are providing security, and Iraqi people being killed by these terrorists, it isn’t a pretty picture. It’s a tough picture.”

Bill Moyers: Our Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed

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I just started reading this myself, but I’m about to go to dinner and I didn’t want to risk forgetting to get this up tonight. So here it is.
Update 10/14/03 – recordings of this speech are now available. I’ve also re-archived them here.
(Thanks, Mark!)
Bill Moyers’ Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform

that the very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press who find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were all one and the same.

Constitutionality of Secret 911 Cases Headed For The Supreme Court

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Secret 9/11 Case Before High Court
By Warren Richey for The Christian Science Monitor.

It’s the case that doesn’t exist. Even though two different federal courts have conducted hearings and issued rulings, there has been no public record of any action. No documents are available. No files. No lawyer is allowed to speak about it. Period.
Yet this seemingly phantom case does exist – and is now headed to the US Supreme Court in what could produce a significant test of a question as old as the Star Chamber, abolished in 17th-century England: How far should a policy of total secrecy extend into a system of justice?
Secrecy has been a key Bush administration weapon in the war on terrorism. Attorney General John Ashcroft warns that mere tidbits of information that seem innocuous about the massive Sept. 11 investigation could help Al Qaeda carry out new attacks.
Yet this highly unusual petition to the high court arising from a Miami case brings into sharp focus the tension between America’s long tradition of open courts and the need for security in times of national peril. At issue is whether certain cases may be conducted entirely behind closed doors under a secret arrangement among prosecutors, judges, and docket clerks.
While secret trial tactics have reportedly been used by federal prosecutors to shield cooperating drug dealers, it’s unclear whether the high court has ever directly confronted the issue. But that may change if they take up MKB v. Warden (No. 03-6747).
This is among the first of the post-Sept. 11 terrorism cases to wend its way to the nation’s highest tribunal. There was no public record of its existence, however, until the appeal was filed with the clerk of the US Supreme Court.
A federal judge and a three-judge federal appeals-court panel have conducted hearings and issued rulings. Yet lawyers and court personnel have been ordered to remain silent.
“The entire dockets for this case and appeal, every entry on them, are maintained privately, under seal, unavailable to the public,” says a partially censored 27-page petition asking the high court to hear the case. “In the court of appeals, not just the filed documents and docket sheet are sealed from public view, but also hidden is the essential fact that a legal proceeding exists.”…
The case is significant because it could force a close examination of secret tactics that are apparently becoming increasingly common under Attorney General Ashcroft. In September 2001, he ordered that all deportation hearings with links to the Sept. 11 investigation be conducted secretly. In addition, the Justice Department has acknowledged that at least nine criminal cases related to the Sept. 11 investigation were being cloaked in total secrecy.
MKB v. Warden is the first indication that the Justice Department is extending its total secrecy policy to proceedings in federal courts dealing with habeas corpus – that is, an individual’s right to force the government to justify his or her detention.
The case offers the Supreme Court an opportunity for the first time to spell out whether such secret judicial proceedings violate constitutional protections. It may also offer the first insight into how much deference a majority of justices is willing to grant the government in areas where the war on terrorism may tread upon fundamental American freedoms…
Federal judges have the authority to order sensitive documents or even entire hearings sealed from public view when disclosure might harm national security. Such rulings are usually issued after the judge has explained the need for secrecy in a decision available to the public.
In addition, judges can order that an individual be identified in public court filings only by a pseudonym or by initials, as happened when the MKB case arrived at the US Supreme Court.
What is highly unusual in MKB v. Warden is that lower court judges ordered the entire case sealed from the start – preventing any mention of it to the public.
In her petition to the court, Miami federal public defender Kathleen Williams says the judges’ actions authorizing the secrecy without any public notice, public hearings, or public findings amount to “an abuse of discretion” that requires corrective action by the justices.
“This habeas corpus case has been heard, appealed, and decided in complete secrecy,” Ms. Williams says in her petition.
A government response to the petition is due Nov. 5. It will mark the first time the Justice Department has publicly acknowledged the existence of the habeas corpus action. The justices are set to consider the case during their Nov. 7 conference.
Justice Department officials have defended the blanket secrecy policy, saying that public hearings and public dockets would undermine efforts to recruit detainees as undercover operatives to infiltrate Al Qaeda cells in the US. According to press reports, similar secret trial tactics have been used by federal prosecutors to shield cooperating drug dealers from mention in public court documents that might blow their cover and end their use as operatives in ongoing undercover narcotics sting operations.

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Soldiers Fence In Saddam’s Home Town

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U.S. Soldiers Seal Saddam’s Home Village
By Slobodan Lekic for the Associated Press.

American soldiers on Friday sealed off the village where Saddam Hussein was born and ordered adults to register for identity cards, while insurgents mounted a series of harassing attacks on U.S. military and Iraqi government targets in the northern city of Mosul.
Starting around midnight Thursday, U.S. soldiers, Iraqi police and civil defense forces moved into Uja, a small dusty village about 10 miles southeast of Tikrit.
Soldiers stretched concertina wire around the perimeter of the village and established checkpoints. Residents over the age of 18 will be required to have registration cards to move in and out of the village, U.S. officers said.

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Newsweek: How Dick Cheney Sold The War

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An interesting Newsweek feature explaining how Dick Cheney bought into the Shrub War and then proceeded to sell it to everyone else.
Of particular interest is the quote below where Cheney says that “we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons” and then Newsweek clarifies that “Cheney later said that he meant “program,” not “weapons.”
However, in Donald Rumsfeld’s Meet The Press Interview, Rumsfeld claims that “they [Iraq] had programs relating to nuclear weapons that they were reconstituting. Not that they had nuclear weapons. No one said that.
So it looks like somebody did say that Saddam had nuclear weapons, and it was Dick Cheney.

Cheney’s Long Path to War
By Mark Hosenball, Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas (With Tamara Lipper, Richard Wolffe and Roy Gutman) for Newsweek.

Of all the president’s advisers, Cheney has consistently taken the most dire view of the terrorist threat. On Iraq, Bush was the decision maker. But more than any adviser, Cheney was the one to make the case to the president that war against Iraq was an urgent necessity. Beginning in the late summer of 2002, he persistently warned that Saddam was stocking up on chemical and biological weapons, and last March, on the eve of the invasion, he declared that “we believe that he [Saddam Hussein] has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons.” (Cheney later said that he meant “program,” not “weapons.” He also said, a bit optimistically, “I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.”) After seven months, investigators are still looking for that arsenal of WMD.
Cheney has repeatedly suggested that Baghdad has ties to Al Qaeda. He has pointedly refused to rule out suggestions that Iraq was somehow to blame for the 9/11 attacks and may even have played a role in the terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. The CIA and FBI, as well as a congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks, have dismissed this conspiracy theory. Still, as recently as Sept. 14, Cheney continued to leave the door open to Iraqi complicity. He brought up a report–widely discredited by U.S. intelligence officials–that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. And he described Iraq as “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” A few days later, a somewhat sheepish President Bush publicly corrected the vice president. There was no evidence, Bush admitted, to suggest that the Iraqis were behind 9/11.

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The Announcement That Started It All: FDA Says Meat, Milk from Cloned Animals Safe

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Note that the FDA thinks cloned animals won’t be used much for meat because of their high price tag. Of course, now we know that, since this story was released, the price is starting to go down already (and sales are way up).

FDA Says Meat, Milk from Cloned Animals Safe
By Randy Fabi for Reuters.

Milk and meat products from cloned cattle, pigs and goats are safe for consumers to eat, according to a Food and Drug Administration document obtained by Reuters on Thursday.
The FDA findings bring the agency one step closer to determining whether to allow the commercialization of food from cloned animals. A final policy decision is expected next year.
Cloned animals — which are genetically identical — are attractive to the industry because ranchers are able to keep their favorite livestock, providing better tasting meat and more milk and eggs.
“Edible products from normal, healthy clones or their progeny do not appear to pose increased food consumption risk,” said the 12-page executive summary of an FDA report. A copy of the report was provided to Reuters by an industry source.
The FDA is expected to release the executive summary of the new report on Friday. The entire report will be released at a later date…
Some consumer groups have urged the FDA to address the moral and ethical concerns of animal cloning before approving its commercialization.
If the FDA does allow it, consumers are most likely to purchase meat and milk from the offspring of cloned animals, the agency said. Their parents will probably not be slaughtered for food because of their high price tag.
A cloned calf can sell for as much as $82,000. An average calf sells for less than $1,000.
Food from the offspring of cloned animals were the most likely to enter the U.S. food supply, the FDA said.

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Organic Farmers Blast FDA’s Careless Decision To Allow Cloned Animal Meat Without Warning Labels

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Organic Valley Blasts F.D.A. Support for Animal Cloning; Warns People are not Guinea Pigs

In Yahoo News.

Today’s statement of support for animal cloning by the F.D.A. was swiftly condemned by Organic Valley, one of the nation’s foremost organic brands and the only one to be 100 percent farmer owned.
“By allowing foods from cloned animals into the food system without proof of their long-term effects on human, animal and environmental health, the F.D.A. is not protecting the consumer. The F.D.A. is furthering their support of the abhorrent attempt by corporate interests to control the genes of our citizenry,” warned George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley.
“American families should not be guinea pigs for corporate greed! Contrary to what the F.D.A. says, there is no level of ‘acceptable risk’ when it comes to putting unproven science on the table for dinner,” said Siemon, in reference to the F.D.A.’s pro-cloning rationale.
Siemon noted that once man-made species are introduced into the environment there is no “calling them back.” He explained: “Whether it’s genetically engineered crops cross pollinating with wild weeds, genetically modified salmon breeding with wild fish, or future concerns with clone mammals, the risks to the balance in ecosystems worldwide are great.”
Consumers Need Animal Cloning Warning Labels
According to the F.D.A., products from cloned animals, like products that have been genetically engineered, do not need to carry a warning label on the package.
“Citizens deserve the right to know what is in their food and how it has been produced,” said Siemon. “At least if the product is labeled as being from cloned animals, consumers can have a choice.”

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