Using Google I found Tommy Franks derogatory quote about Douglas Feith that appears in Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack" and is related to the Geneva convention. Unfrotunately I have not able to find a connection to robust regression yet. See http://www.nndb.com/people/100/000047956/.
As I research this more I think this was most likely a joke perhaps related to this:
"In December 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and then Bush received Franks’s preliminary commander’s estimate, followed by
the first workable’, in Tenet’s words, Iraq war plan put to Bush on 1
February 2002 and successive plans through to Bush’s final approval on
6 September.[22] One of the variables from the outset was the degree
of international support and involvement. The assumptions about levels
of allied support ranged from ‘robust’ through ‘reduced’ to nil. If
the American military had their way, they would operate unilaterally,
but pressures come from the politicians to make room for allies."
I found this quote of Franks which is most likely connected to the Lancet article:
"In the article below we were wrong to say that a household survey conducted by the World Health Organisation and the Iraqi health
ministry found that the rate of violent deaths had doubled in Iraq
after the invasion. The survey did not make this finding. Figures that
were unadjusted for under-reporting showed a doubling of the rate of
all deaths and a violence-related death rate about 11 times higher.
The article said the survey estimated that 151,000 civilians had been
killed since the invasion. That figure included combatants. The
article below should have also made clear that the Lancet and Opinion
Research Business surveys included combatants as well as civilians."
" Lieutenant General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and
Afghanistan during his time as head of US Central Command, once
announced, "We don't do body counts." This blunt response to a
question about civilian casualties was an attempt to distance George
Bush's wars from the disaster of Vietnam. One of the rituals of that
earlier conflict was the daily announcement of how many Vietnamese
fighters US forces had killed. It was supposed to convince a sceptical
American public that victory was coming. But the 'body count' concept
sounded callous - and never more so than when it emerged that many of
the alleged guerrilla dead were in fact women, children and other
unarmed civilians."
