NEWS TRANSCRIPT from the United States Department of Defense
DoD News Briefing
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
Thursday, February 21, 2002 - 12:03 p.m. EST
(Also participating was Gen. Richard Myers, chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.)


Q : Mr. Secretary, since these people in the compounds at Hazar Qadam on 23 January were not al Qaeda and were not Taliban, would you say in retrospect that the raid was a mistake? And can we take it from what you've said that no disciplinary at all will be involved?

RUMSFELD : Let me try to use my words. I do not think it is a mistake for people to observe carefully and made a judgment about behavior on the ground, and then make a calculation that there is compelling evidence of Taliban or al Qaeda activity, but not sufficiently compelling to use air power, instead to go in on the ground. I think that is certainly no mistake.

And once going in on the ground, it seems to me it is no mistake at all, if you're fired on, to fire back. And we expect people to defend themselves and to take exactly the action that, at least at the moment, I'm aware they took.

Q : And no disciplinary action?

RUMSFELD : Why would there be? I can't imagine why there would be any.

RUMSFELD : I don't think it is an error. I think it's just a fact that circumstances on the ground in Afghanistan are difficult. It's untidy. It is not a neat situation where all the good guys are here and the bad guys are there. It is a difficult situation.

Q : Because there's a lot of people, then, who were innocents here that were killed. What is happening --

RUMSFELD : Well, wait a second. They fired -- let's not call them "innocents." We don't know quite what they were. They were people who fired on our forces.

Q : If you're in that compound and it's at night and you see armed men coming at you, then it would seem to me that it would be acting in self-defense to fire at them.

RUMSFELD : You could view it that way as well, I suppose. Even though you weren't fired on, someone could say that they saw someone coming up with a weapon, and even though the weapon wasn't pointed at them and it wasn't being fired at them, that in their own self-defense, they decided to shoot. Someone could say that. My impression is someone could say it either way.

Q : Mr. Secretary, I was in that very village three days after the raids --

RUMSFELD : Were you?

Q : And there seemed to be considerable discrepancies between what you're saying and what the locals reported in very large numbers, including the fact that it seems that U.S. forces had no interpreters with them; that the people in the building where 19 people were killed were shouting that "we're friends, we're friends" in Pashtu; that most of them were found dead in their beds; that there were considerable other discrepancies that don't match with what you're reporting here.

Q : Have you personally been given an adequate explanation or seen any photographic evidence to refute these claims that some of these victims at Hazar Qadam were shot in their beds or dead men were found handcuffed?

MYERS : We know that there were people that presented themselves that weren't armed and were not shot. Those that were shooting back, we dealt with force. You put those -- the quick plastic straps on to subdue people, and some of those may have been shot, so while they're waiting for medical care, you handcuff them, but they certainly weren't shot in their handcuffs. It's possible, maybe somebody died because -- with their cuffs on, thinking -- and they'd say, "Well, they were shot with them on." But that's not how that would work.