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Whopper: Donald Rumsfeld

By Timothy Noah
Posted Friday, Nov. 14, 2003, at 3:45 PM ET

"Q: Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said, I remember this it was done very well, you said they would welcome us with open arms.

"A: Never said that.

"Q: Never said that?

"A: Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find anywhere me saying anything like either one of those two things you just said I said. I may look like somebody else."

—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a Sept. 25, 2003 interview with Sinclair Broadcasting.

"Q: Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?

"A: There's obviously the Shia population in Iraq and the Kurdish population in Iraq have been treated very badly by Saddam Hussein's regime, they represent a large fraction of the total. There is no question but that they would be welcomed. Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda would not let them do."

—Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a Feb. 20, 2003 interview with PBS's NewsHour.

(Thanks to Eric Rosenberg, Hearst Newspapers.)

Got a whopper? Send it to . To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Whopper Archive:
Oct. 31,2003: George W. Bush
Oct. 17, 2003: Grady Little
Sept. 16, 2003: John Ashcroft
Sept. 5, 2003: Christy Whitman
Aug. 29, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
Aug. 22, 2003: Arianna Huffington
Aug. 8, 2003: Howard Dean
July 25, 2003: Condoleezza Rice
July 18, 2003: President Bush
July 10, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
June 27, 2003: Remembering Strom
June 20, 2003: Billy Bulger
May 30, 2003: Ari Fleischer
May 23, 2003: Donald Rumsfeld
May 19, 2003: Un-Whopper: Ari Fleischer Tells Truth!
May 2, 2003: Peggy Cooper Cafritz
April 17, 2003: Eason Jordan
March 7, 2003: John Kerry
Feb. 28, 2003: Ari Fleischer
Feb. 14, 2003: Bill O'Reilly
Feb. 7, 2003: Saddam Hussein
Jan. 31, 2003: Karl Rove
Jan. 23, 2003: Bill Frist
Jan. 17, 2003: Naji Sabri
Jan. 10, 2003: Rod Paige

(Click here to access the Whopper Archive for 2002 and here to access the Whopper Archive for 2001.)

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