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| Home Front: Politix |
| Bill Bennet Interviews Rummy |
| 2004-04-08 |
| EFL - Rummy provides a perspective on Hearts & Minds in another part of the article. Q: Last thing, and this – I wrote it down, I carried it around with me for months. I was once the secretary of education, far less exalted than your position, but you said, you know, we lack the metrics to know if we’re winning or losing, but you said, I’ll tell you, recapturing, killing or deferring or dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and radical clerics or recruiting, training and deploying. That is we can kill and we’re good at it and we’re the most effective military in the world. But how do we address the larger problem, which is the problem of the mind, the problem of training, the problem of indoctrination, the education of a terrorist? Rumsfeld: Well, there’s no doubt, but that we are putting enormous pressure on terrorists and very successfully on their bank accounts, on their ability to move money, on their ability to travel and communicate. We’re capturing and interrogating in large numbers all across the world. We’ve got 90 countries that are cooperating and that side of it is moving along. The piece of it that I was referring to there is that there’s no – I said no metric, there’s no knowledge. We don’t have knowledge as to the numbers of people being brought in the intake
Q: Yeah. Rumsfeld: 
and trained and taught that it’s a good thing to go out and kill innocent men, women and children. That is a major job for our country. It’s particularly a job for the people of that faith who know that their religion is being hijacked by a very small minority o people. And that’s -- terrorism isn’t part of that religion. Q: I’ve been persuaded a lot by Bernard Lewis, emeritus professor at Princeton. This is – there may be a billion Muslims in the world – maybe 100 million of the radical Islam persuasion. Where are the 900 million making their case, you know, lending their weight to push this thing back in the right direction? Rumsfeld: Well, think what’s going on in Afghanistan. Q: Right. Rumsfeld: Think what’s going on – I mean India has a very large Muslim population that’s conducted itself exceedingly well. Pakistan has a Muslim population and they’re one of our principal cooperating partners in the global war on terror. They’ve been enormously cooperative. Turkey is a modern success in a Muslim country. So
Q: You’re right. Rumsfeld: They’re all across the globe. And what you’ve got is a relatively small number of people who were determined to have it their way. And as a result, they’re perfectly willing to kill all kinds of people. Q: I think India has the second-largest Muslim country and you just mentioned. I read there are no Indian members of al Qaeda, as far as we know, because they’re too busy building an economy and trying to prove their lot. I mean, that’s – there’s an important message there, isn’t there? Rumsfeld: I think there is. We’ve got a number of countries that have large Muslim populations who are contributing to the world and to civilization and you have a relatively small number of terrorists that are going about the globe in Bali and in Turkey and in Saudi Arabia and in Spain and in the United States and in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to kill people. |
| Posted by:Super Hose |
| #3 Ship, LOL. You really know how to hit a man when he's down. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-04-08 8:28:32 PM |
| #2 Q: So... who do you like in the National League. Rumsfeld: Well, the Marlins retained their core but the Cubs got Mad Dawg Maddux... so I'm going with the Cubs. Q: Got any money? |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-04-08 3:42:56 PM |
| #1 Why aren't major media outlets publishing interviews like these? ( * crickets chirping * ) |
| Posted by: Raj 2004-04-08 12:34:08 PM |