|
 Secretary
Rumsfeld Comments on the Briefing of Prince Bandar
before the Iraq War
April
20, 2004
Mr.
Sean Hannity, Fox News: I did read that
you had written down what the downside was from
the very beginning, but let me just give you a
quote here. "And he talks about this
specifically that two days before the president
told Secretary Powell, Dick Cheney and you had
already briefed Prince Bandar, the Saudi
ambassador." That is false?
U.S.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: I
just cannot believe that. Now I'm one
person. I'm not in every meeting that the
Secretary Powell was in or every meeting that the
president was in, but I was in a meeting and I do
not even remember in that meeting that Prince
Bandar was told that the president had made such a
decision. I don't remember hearing that. I
remember the discussion and the meeting.
Mr.
Hannity: And you briefed Prince Bandar?
Secretary
Rumsfeld: There were four of us: Prince
Bandar, the vice president, and General Myers, and
myself. And there were issues that were
raised about Saudi Arabia and various other
things, but certainly I was never in a position,
nor was General Myers, to communicate a decision
on the part of the president which to my knowledge
at that point he hadn't even made.
[Unrelated
portions of interview deleted.]
Mr.
Hannity: As it relates, Mr. Secretary,
to Prince Bandar, why would it be appropriate to
brief him even if the decision, as you said in the
last segment, wasn't made to go to war yet?
Why would we brief him?
Secretary
Rumsfeld: Well, first of all you can be
sure that the -- there was no way the United
States' efforts in the United Nations and the
diplomacy building up to the war could be credible
unless the -- there were a -- happened to be a
flow of forces supporting that diplomacy. As
a result, the president asked the Department of
Defense to have the forces flow in a way that
would be supportive of the diplomacy -- that would
be credible to Saddam Hussein in the outside hope
that he would decide to cooperate with the
inspectors.
To
do that required the cooperation of some of the
neighboring countries. [See related item
below] That means you had to then have
discussions with them about how might we be able
to use some of your capabilities, whether it's
real estate or airfields or ports or cooperation
or overflight rights, and we had to talk to a lot
of countries, which we did, over a sustained
period of many, many months. And in the
course of that, the way you do that is you meet
with either the country's leadership or their
ambassadors and obviously in the case of Prince
Bandar he has a relationship here with a great
many people and we spoke to him.
Click
here to read the complete transcript.
Source: U.S.
Department of Defense
Related
Item
Fatal
Friendship: Our ill-conceived
vendetta against the Saudis,
by Patrick J.
Buchanan - excerpt:
| "Now
we learn from John Solomon of the AP
that when NATO ally Turkey denied us
basing rights, 'Saudi Arabia secretly
helped the United States far more than
has been acknowledged, allowing
operations from at least three air
bases, permitting special forces to
stage attacks from Saudi soil, and
providing cheap fuel..'
Gen.
T. Michael Moseley, architect of the air
campaign, calls the Saudis 'wonderful
partners.' 'We operated the command
center in Saudi -Arabia. We operated
airplanes out of Saudi Arabia, as well
as sensors, and tankers,' said General
Moseley, adding that he treasured 'their
counsel, their mentoring, their
leadership and their support.'"
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