Saddam targeted Bush, Rumsfeld daughters

[Jan Klimkowski]

WASHINGTON Former US secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld revealed Tuesday that Saddam Hussein had a $60 million bounty on his daughters' head and also targeted ex-president George W. Bush's two daughters.

"I was concerned," Rumsfeld told ABC's "Good Morning America" in his first live television interview since leaving office over four years ago.

"Of course, the president and his family had secret service protection. My family did not. And it was a somewhat awkward moment in the meeting," he added in describing a 2003 national security meeting when he was told of the plot.

Rumsfeld, who has two daughters and a son, said Bush urged him to take the threat seriously because US forces had killed Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay and his 14-year-old grandson Mustapha in July 2003.

"I made a comment like 'Thank you' or something and president Bush looked me in the eye and said 'You better take this seriously,'" the former Pentagon chief recalled.

"And of course, I did take it seriously. But I was also realistic that there was not much one could do about that."

The television appearance was part of Rumsfeld's effort to promote his new memoir, "Known and Unkown," which was released earlier and recounts his long government career serving Republican presidents from Richard Nixon to Bush.

The story is rubbish for the following reasons:

i) the source is Rumsfeld who is not a credible source;

ii) reading the piece above, Rumsfeld appears to be claiming that his source was George W Bush. Horseshit. If there was genuine intelligence that Saddam had targeted Rumsfeld's family, then Rumsfeld himself would have insisted on reading it, and secondly could have demanded 24/7 security protection was provided given his decades' long seniority in US governments;

iii) the story reads as a typical Rumsfeld/Bush folksy concoction, and surely we know by now that such accounts are there to divert us from the truth.

Rumsfeld famously opined:

[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns the ones we don't know we don't know.

Well I know we know that Rumsfeld is talking crap.