Reply #23: TRANSCRIPT of the comment in question [View All]

[VolcanoJen]

The quote came shortly after the protestors, and should give us a whole lot to chew over...

Per my Tivo:

Donald Rumsfeld: "Interestingly, about a month or two after September 11, I was in Oman, meeting with the Sultan of Oman in a tent, south of his country, he was was visiting his constituents.

He said, you know, as terrible as September 11th was, it may very well be that it was a blessing in disguise. I said, how so? And he said it was terrible, the loss of 3,000 human beings, but if it will awake the world, if it will cause us to act, if it will cause people to stop people from teaching (that) it is a good thing to kill innocent men, women and children. If that were to happen before we had a September 11, where not 3,000 people were killed, but 30,000, or 300,000, through a biological attack or whatever, he said, then it would have served a useful purpose.

That is, in a very important sense, a task we have, a responsibility we have to do everything we can as people to see that we don't have an event of that magnitude. The global war is not a war we fight so we can declare victory and go home, really. The world was changed on September 11, and if we're going to be able to live as free people and say what we want and go where we wish and send our children off to school knowing they'll be able to come home, not be terrorized, not alter the way we live our lives, then we have to recognize that we have to change, that we have to deal with these new threats in different ways."