In the video below, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was interviewed by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who confronted the Iraq War architect with his statements regarding former Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein and his putative connection to the 9/11 terror attacks.
The Daily Beast reported that Morris' documentary, "The Unknown Known," tells the story of the bill of goods that Rumsfeld and his cohorts in the Bush administration sold to the U.S. public in order to gin up support for the invasion of Iraq.
In the interview below, Morris asked Rumsfeld whether the Bush administration had worked particularly hard to forge an erroneous connection between Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Rumsfeld said. “It was very clear that the direct planning for 9/11 was done by Osama bin Laden’s people, al Qaeda, and in Afghanistan. I don’t think the American people were confused about that.”
"In 2003, in a Washington Post poll," said Morris, "Sixty-nine percent say that they believe that it is likely that the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda."
Rumsfeld contended that to his memory, no administration official "said anything like that. Nor do I recall anyone believing that."
Morris rolled a video clip from Feb. 4, 2003, in which then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked by a reporter to respond to Hussein's contention that he had no weapons of mass destruction nor any relationship with Al-Qaeda.
"And Abraham Lincoln was short," quipped Rumsfeld in 2003. "How does one respond to that? It's just a continuous pattern. It's a case of the local liar coming up again and people repeating what he said and people forgetting to say that he never, almost never, rarely tells the truth."
Watch the video, embedded below:
