What they do is when there’s a bomb goes down, they grab some children and some women and pretend that the bomb hit the women and the children. And it seems to me that it’s up to all of us to try to tell the truth, to say what we know, to say what we don’t know, and recognize that we’re dealing with people that are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case. And to the extent people lie, ultimately, they are caught lying and they lose their credibility, and one would think it wouldn’t take very long for that to happen dealing with people like this.
The documentary Control Room used clips of this press “stakeout” of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld talking about civilian casualties during war. I happened to look it up and was sort of surprised to see that it was from 29 October 2001, and referred to Afghanistan, not Iraq. Sometimes it’s helpful to look back and verify just how far back the lying started; that’s just a month and a half after 9/11.