Secretary Rumsfeld is RAISING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS.

"I think also what's important is that people lift their eyes up off their shoelaces and go back to the fundamental and the fundamental issue is that we live in a different world today. We live in the 21st century. We're not back in the 20th century, where the principal focus is conventional weapons. We're in the 21st century, where the principal focus must be weapons -- unconventional weapons -- weapons potentially that could involve killing not hundreds of people but tens of thousands of people -- chemical weapons, biological weapons, potentially nuclear weapons.

"And that means that we have to take that aboard as a people, and we have to talk about it, and we have to consider it. What does it mean? How does it conceivably affect our behavior? There are clearly risks to acting in any instance. But there are also risks to not acting. And those have to be weighed. People have to talk about them intelligently. These are important subjects for Congress, for the press, for the academic institutions, for the world community. And that's what this process is.

"And I keep hearing people say, "Oh, Europe's unhappy with this" or "Somebody doesn't agree with that" or "Some general said this" or "Some civilian said that." I think what's important is the substance of this discussion. And I see too little attention to it and too much attention to the personality aspects of it, if you will, and to the trying to juxtapose what one person said against what somebody else said for the personality aspect of it, rather than for the substance of it. And if you think about our circumstance, when the penalty for not acting is September 11th, if you will, or a Pearl Harbor, where hundreds and a few thousand people are killed, that is a very serious thing. You've made a conscious decision not to act. And the penalty with that, for those people, it's a hundred percent. It's not one thousand or two thousand, it's that person is gone. If, on the other hand, the penalty for not acting is not a conventional or a terrorist attack of that magnitude, but one of many multiples of that, it forces people to stop and have the kind of debate we're having. What ought we to be thinking about? How ought we, if at all, to be changing our behavior? How ought we to live in this new 21st century world? What does it mean that tens of thousands of human beings can be killed in a biological attack if we allow it to happen as a society? Are we comfortable with that? Is that something that we've decided that it's so disadvantageous to take an action without proof that you could go into a court of law and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that something was going to happen, that the capabilities existed for -- of absolute certain knowledge, and that the intent to use those was imminent and clear, and you don't -- you may not have the type of certain knowledge. You may want that kind of knowledge in a law enforcement case, where we're interested in protecting the rights of the accused. You may have a different conclusion if you're talking about the death of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children. We're not talking about combatants here, we're talking about the kinds of people who were killed on September 11th. So it is that construct that needs to be considered. And it ought to be -- it ought to be talked about and well read through and thought about, it seems to me."