Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in November 2002:
“[T]here is no question but that there have been interactions between the Iraqi government, Iraqi officials and al Qaeda operatives, they have occurred over a span of some eight or 10 years to our knowledge, that there are currently al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Rumsfeld in September 2002:
“Before I left for Poland I gathered some thoughts with a couple of people who work with me — Paul Wolfowitz and others. We said why don’t we get this into the intelligence community, let them scrub it over the next week or so, see if they can find out what portion of it can be made public. They did, they came back, we ended up with five or six sentences that were bullet-proof. We could say them, they’re factual, they’re exactly accurate. They demonstrate that there are in fact al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Rumsfeld yesterday:
When asked about any connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, Rumsfeld said, “To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”
Aren’t you glad Rumsfeld came out of hiding?