Advertisement

Rumsfeld: It ‘Has Got To Be Embarrassing’ To Get Intelligence Wrong

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — famous for pushing the United States into a costly war in Iraq based on wildly false intelligence — criticized U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice for being wrong about what caused the recent attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.

Rice had said that the anti-Islam video that sparked protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was also the catalyst for the Libya attack, an assessment that the Obama administration soon after acknowledged was not correct.

Without any hint of irony, Rumsfeld said last night on Fox News that he was amazed that she could be so wrong, adding, that “has got to be embarrassing”:

RUMSFELD: I watched the presentation, and I thought it was amazing that someone in her position would go on with that degree of certainty, that fast and that authoritatively and be that wrong.

Advertisement

VAN SUSTEREN: Do you think she was perhaps hung out to dry? Because I thought it was unusual that the ambassador of the U.N. would be making that appearance right after that event. I would have expected some other member of the administration, not the ambassador to the U.N.

RUMSFELD: I agree. It would have been more likely that someone from the cabinet or the White House staff or the NSC staff might have said something. It may very well be that she was already scheduled and they just used her. But her — her presentation was demonstrated to be inaccurate within a matter of hours, which has got to be embarrassing.

Watch the clip:

The war in Iraq did come up later in the segment, however, Rumsfeld never expressed any embarrassment about how wrong he was about it. “I think that each country is considerably better off by not having the Taliban in Afghanistan and not having the “butcher of Baghdad,” Saddam Hussein, in Iraq,” he said. “The countries have been given an opportunity to have a freer political system and a freer economic system.”