On Tuesday, Al Jazeera released an interview excerpt with former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in which Abderrahim Foukara, Al Jazeera's Washington DC Bureau Chief, asked Rumsfeld direct and contentious questions concerning the US role in the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
At one point Foukara asked:
"To what extent do you think that those criminals that you've just talked about, and the policies that your administration at the time pursued in Iraq, were equally responsible for the killing of innocent Iraqis, because, for example, you did not secure the borders of Iraq, going into Iraq with 130,000-140,000, which many people in the Pentagon told you was not enough."
Rumsfeld looked surprised at the way the question was framed, that there could be any suggestion of American responsibility for the deaths of innocent Iraqis, or that Rumsfeld might have done anything wrong.
Rumsfeld, failing to answer the question about the troop levels, did address the suggestion that the Pentagon had many people advising the Bush White House prior to the invasion that they would need more troops to secure Iraq.
Rumsfeld said: "There was no-one in the Pentagon that said they were not enough. The President went around the room, he asked every one of them, do you have everything you need? Do you have the numbers you want?"
However, a few weeks prior to the Iraq invasion, the Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, had testified before Congress that a force of "several hundred thousand" troops would be required to occupy Iraq to secure it. Rumsfeld at the time rejected this figure as "far off the mark" and made it clear to military commanders that his low-ball number of required troops was the policy.
Further, Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's Deputy Defense Secretary, asserted a smaller occupation force would be sufficient in Iraq because "there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq".
This statement was neither historically correct, nor did it prove to be an accurate prediction of the basis for so much of the violence that plagued Iraq in the coming years.
After Rumsfeld's answer to his question, Foukara asked Rumsfeld if just because he could not recall any US military leader asking for more troops at the time, "does that make the numbers right?"
Rumsfeld seemed incensed that his answer, which in fact did not address the question Foukara had originally asked, was being ignored, and that the reporter was persisting in trying to obtain what Foukara repeatedly called "a straight answer" from the former Defense Secretary.
Rumsfeld, again ignoring the question about the numbers of troops, then went on the attack, asking Foukara "Do you want to yell? Or do you want to have an interview? You have a choice."
Rumsfeld and Foukara then spent several minutes arguing over whether Foukara was being respectful or "haranguing", with Rumsfeld dismissing the exchange as "worthless" and accusing Al Jazeera of dropping "all this on the cutting-room floor…if you don't like it."
However, Al Jazeera decided to show the world the exchange. No comment has so far been forthcoming from Donald Rumsfeld about the interview being published on YouTube.
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