Secretary denies any pressure to fire Boykin

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he is under no pressure from the White House to fire Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, despite President Bush’s public distancing of himself from the general’s remarks about Islam.

“I personally have not had any communication on the subject with the White House,” Mr. Rumsfeld said in an interview at the Pentagon with editors and reporters from The Washington Times. “The only one who has talked to the White House on this subject is from a press standpoint.”

Gen. Boykin, an evangelical Christian who serves as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence and special operations, has been quoted as saying that the war against terrorism is a battle between good and evil, with terrorists representing “Satan.”

The comments first came under fire last week when NBC News broadcast video clips of speeches he had made at Christian functions while in uniform.

A Los Angeles Times columnist had secretly recorded the comments during Gen. Boykin’s witnessing in churches in Oklahoma, Oregon and Florida.

Lawrence DiRita, Mr. Rumsfeld’s acting assistant secretary for public affairs, said yesterday that a review of the statements, requested by Gen. Boykin earlier this week, will be conducted by the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General, with support from the inspector general of the Army.

Asked yesterday about what would be necessary to justify any disciplinary action against Gen. Boykin, Mr. Rumsfeld said: “I am not a lawyer.”

“There’s all kinds of rules and regulations and requirements,” he said. “People will look at them and they’ll discuss those and then one will compare his circumstance and those rules and regulations at his request.”

Mr. DiRita yesterday told The Washington Times that before the matter was turned over to the Inspector General’s Office, Pentagon officials had asked NBC and the Los Angeles Times for copies of Gen. Boykin’s statements, but had been refused.

Mr. Rumsfeld said on Tuesday that he has seen only “one of the network tapes,” which “had a lot of very difficult-to-understand words with subtitles which I was not able to verify.”

However, Mr. Bush said Wednesday that the opinion of Gen. Boykin “just doesn’t reflect what the government thinks.”

In one speech, Gen. Boykin referred to an Islamic warlord in Somalia who had said U.S. forces would never catch him because Allah would protect him.

“Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol,” the general said.

During his interview with The Times, Mr. Rumsfeld also fielded questions about other facets of the relationship between Islam and the war on terrorism, including the ongoing Guantanamo Bay espionage probe involving a Muslim chaplain and Arabic translators.

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