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October 5, 2011

Rumsfeld Refuses to Answer Al Jazeera Reporter on Iraq War 
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Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is back in the news over a
heated exchange with a reporter from Al Jazeera. In a sit-down
interview, Rumsfeld refused to answer a question over criticisms he
failed to deploy sufficient troop numbers during the Iraq invasion to
secure Iraq's borders.

Reporter: "Do you think the numbers you went into the Iraq war [with],
the number of U.S. troops that you went into Iraq with, did absolve you
from the responsibility of the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis
killed by the coalition and those criminals that you talked about?"

Donald Rumsfeld: "Are you going to stop?"

Reporter: "Give me a straight answer."

Rumsfeld: "You can characterize my answers which every way you want, and
you do it in a pejorative way."

Reporter: "I do it with respect."

Rumsfeld: "No, you do not at all. Obviously, you are of that nature. It
is clear that your being, that you like to do that."

Rumsfeld has a controversial history with Al Jazeera. Under his watch,
the U.S. military attacked Al Jazeera reporters and staffers at least
three times, including a 2003 bombing that killed correspondent Tareq
Ayoub in Baghdad; and imprisoned several of its reporters. In 2004,
Rumsfeld called Al Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq war “vicious,
inaccurate and inexcusable."



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