Donald Rumsfeld: Extended Interview — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00on the morning of 911 I was having
2. 0:02breakfast with a group of congressmen
3. 0:04from the um House of Representatives and
4. 0:07we
5. 0:08discussed the defense budget I had made
6. 0:11the comment that at some point in the
7. 0:14coming months year uh there would be an
8. 0:16event and H it would cause members of
9. 0:19Congress to recognize the point I was
10. 0:22making that we did need to invest in
11. 0:25intelligence and defense and Adil JM
12. 0:28Bastiani came in my senior military
13. 0:30assistant with a note indicating that a
14. 0:32plane had crashed into the one of the
15. 0:35World Trade Center
16. 0:37towers the mood in the building and in
17. 0:40the room changed dramatically and it was
18. 0:42shortly thereafter that uh we felt that
19. 0:45the Pentagon had been hit it felt like a
20. 0:47a bomb the smoke began to fill up in the
21. 0:50building and so we went downstairs
22. 0:53outside and around the building to uh to
23. 0:56the crash site and it was a a terrible
24. 0:59terrible crash site with flame and smoke
25. 1:02and and uh uh bodies um pieces of metal
26. 1:06spread all across the grass outside of
27. 1:09the Pentagon I went back to my office
28. 1:12and recognized that I had a
29. 1:14responsibility I was told that we needed
30. 1:17to evacuate the building and I declined
31. 1:19I did not want the terrorist to be
32. 1:22successful in shutting down the Pentagon
33. 1:24the Department of Defense was was in
34. 1:26business and we were there we were going
35. 1:29to functioning and we were not going to
36. 1:31have a a group of terrorists uh close us
37. 1:34down and and prevent us from doing
38. 1:36whatever it is we needed to do to help
39. 1:38defend the American
40. 1:40people needless to say when you have an
41. 1:43attack like September 11th as as the
42. 1:46intelligence Community says the the uh
43. 1:49system was blinking red what else might
44. 1:52occur how do you fight a war with an
45. 1:55entity a non-state
46. 1:58entity um that
47. 2:00that is functioning in a state that
48. 2:02you're not at war with there is no guide
49. 2:04book this had never happened before
50. 2:06there was no plan what you had to do was
51. 2:09to um figure it out uh from
52. 2:18scratch