Ray McGovern Takes on Rummy and Wins

During a public appearance by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfled on Thursday, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern asked Rummy why he lied to the American people - expressly throwing this quote from March 2003 about his so-called knowledge of the exact locations of Saddam's WMD back at him:

MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, weapons of mass destruction. Key goal of the military campaign is finding those weapons of mass destruction. None have been found yet. There was a raid on the Answar Al-Islam Camp up in the north last night. A lot of people expected to find ricin there. None was found. How big of a problem is that? And is it curious to you that given how much control U.S. and coalition forces now have in the country, they haven't found any weapons of mass destruction?

SEC. RUMSFELD: Not at all. If you think -- let me take that, both pieces -- the area in the south and the west and the north that coalition forces control is substantial. It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.

This transcript of Rumsfeld's appearance on This Week is on the Department of Defense's website. For Rummy to back away from it now in yet another attempt to revise history, is nothing short of asinine.

(A transcript of McGovern's questioning of Rumsfeld will be posted shortly.)

Via CNN:

"Why did you lie to get us into a war that caused these kind of casualties and was not necessary?" asked Ray McGovern, the former analyst.

"I did not lie," shot back Rumsfeld, who waved off security guards ready to remove McGovern from the hall at the Southern Center for International Studies.

Rumsfeld tried to tell McGovern that he said he knew where "suspect sites" of WMD were. He clearly lied.

More from the DoD's website regarding whether or not Rumsfeld said there was "bulletproof" evidence about links between Saddam and al Qaeda, which McGovern also asked Rumsfeld about today and he tried to distance himself from as well:

October, 2002

Rumsfeld: There's one other thing I forgot to do, and that is to go to New York Times editorial comment, which said something about me using the word "bulletproof." And it's true, I did. What happened was, as I recall, I think I was here on probably the 26th of September, I think I was told, and in a press briefing I was asked about the linkage between al Qaeda and Iraq. And I took a piece of paper -- this one, as fate would have it -- which I had gotten from the Central Intelligence Agency -- and asked them -- which I'd asked them for -- and I believe I said that, that a number of us had said, "Give us the definitive word." And so I read off of it and said it was from the intelligence agency, I believe.

Then I was down the next day, I think, in Atlanta, and I was asked about this subject, and I said that the agency had come back to me with five or six sentences that were bulletproof. And it was the -- when I said the -- something was bulletproof, I was referring to the five or six sentences that I had read here off of a piece of paper which I'd received from the agency.

Crooks and Liars now has the video of the exchange between Rummy and McGovern.