A Furious Donald Rumsfeld Refuses To Answer Questions In Al Jazeera Interview: ‘This Is Worthless’
Halfway through the Obama tenure, his predecessors are still running into trouble about their legacies in interviews. This week, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sat down with Al Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara to talk about the Bush legacy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and found Foukara’s questions so infuriating that he flat out refused to answer them, instead decrying Foukara for “haranguing.”
Foukara asked Rumsfeld to elaborate on how he saw the policies in Iraq, namely, whether he felt “responsible for the killing of innocent Iraqis.” The mere formulation of the question resulted in much crosstalk, with Rumsfeld arguing that Foukara’s assertions were “fundamentally false” and asking him whether he “want[s] to yell or do you want to do an interview?” Foukara attempted to rephrase his question: “Do you think the numbers of US troops that you went into Iraq with did absolve you from the responsibility of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis killed by the coalition and those criminals you talked about?” He implored Rumsfeld to “give me a straight answer.”
Rumsfeld replied to that last bit by suggesting that “you can characterize my answers any way you want, and you’re doing it in a pejorative way.” He refused to answer the question because “you’re not being respectful, you’re just talking.” Rumsfeld continued to express his displeasure as Foukara demanded an answer, concluding, “this is worthless, this is not an interview– you’re haranguing.” It wasn’t the most cheerful of exchanges or interviews, and Foukara’s question never got a full answer given its alleged disrespectfulness.
The segment via Al Jazeera below:
