Reminder: Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Parade Magazine

Presenter: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld Friday, Oct. 12, 2001

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Secretary Rumsfeld Interview with Parade Magazine

(Interview with Lyric Wallwork Winik, Parade Magazine)

Q: Let me start by asking you, most of us are programmed to leave a building with smoke. What made you go towards the fire here a little over a month ago, and what was going through your mind?

Rumsfeld: Well, I was sitting here and the building was struck, and you could feel the impact of it very clearly, and I don't know what made me do anything I did, to be honest with you. I just do it instinctive. I looked out the window, saw nothing here, and then went down the hall until the smoke was too bad, then to a stairwell down and went outside and saw what had happened. Asked a person who'd seen it, and he told me that a plane had flown into it.

I had been aware of a plane going into the World Trade Center, and I saw people on the grass, and we just, we tried to put them in stretchers and then move them out across the grass towards the road and lifted them over a jersey wall so the people on that side could stick them into the ambulances.

I was out there for awhile, and then people started gathering, and we were able to get other people to do that, to hold IVs for people. There were people lying on the grass with clothes blown off and burns all over them.

Then at some moment I decided I should be in here figuring out what to do, because your brain begins to connect things, and there were enough people there to worry about that. I came back in here, came into this office. There was smoke in here by then.

We made a judgment about where people should be. The chairman was out of town, so he was separate. The vice chairman was with me. We had my deputy go out to another site. At a certain point it got too bad and we went into a room about 30 yards away here in this building, in the same general area but back that way that is sealable. But as it turns out it wasn't sealable for smoke and so forth. We worked in there, and we kept being told the building had to be evacuated completely except for the people that were in that group that were assisting me, and they kept saying you should get out of here because these people have to stay if you're here, as I recall. I said fine, we'll do that at the appropriate time.

more...

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2001/t11182001_t1012pm.html

Since you were the ONLY person in this country authorized to relay a shoot-down order, according to the change of procedure approved on June 1, 2001, and you were already aware of the planes hitting the WTC, why wasn't your first priority to plant yourself by a working telephone? Criminal negligence or criminal incompetence?