Six Questions on Donald Rumsfeld for Andrew Cockburn

If you miss having Donald Rumsfeld to kick around, you'll definitely want to check out Andrew Cockburn's soon-to-be released Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy. Cockburn, who for the past three decades has written on national security issues for such publications as Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, shreds the former secretary of defense, following Rumsfeld's career from his early days in the Nixon Administration (Nixon once called him a “ruthless little bastard”) through his departure last fall. Cockburn's previous books include The Threat, Inside the Soviet Military Machine, and Out of the Ashes, the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, which he co-authored with his brother, Patrick.

1. The conventional view in the media is that Rumsfeld was a pillar of strength and acted decisively on 9/11, yet you report that he “deserted his post.” Where was Rumsfeld in the aftermath of the attacks?

It was a typical day for Rumsfeld, in that he didn't do what he was meant to do, which was coordinate the defense of the United States. He's a micromanager. When he heard a plane had hit the building, he didn't stop to think about what it meant, he wandered outside without telling anyone—to have a look. It's what you or I might have done, but you and I weren't the secretary of defense. It finally dawned on him that he might have a job to do, but even then, the plane hit the Pentagon at 9:38 a.m. and he didn't arrive at the National Military Command Center until about 10:30. They were desperately looking for him and no one knew where he was.

2. How closely involved was Rumsfeld in the detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and elsewhere?

He played an important role, and he had close involvement in the torture of one particular prisoner. Mohammed al-Qahtani was alleged to have been the “twentieth hijacker” and he may well have been, but he hadn't been able to get into the country. They later picked him up in Afghanistan and sent him to Guantánamo. In 2002 Rumsfeld signed a now-famous directive that approved sleep deprivation, stress positions, and the refinement of various cruel methods. He had this guy in mind when he signed it. We know from Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt, who was appointed in 2005 to investigate FBI allegations of abuses at Guantánamo, that Rumsfeld was regularly calling in to find out what was happening with al-Qahtani's interrogation, and it was clear that they were using techniques on him that had been approved by Rumsfeld. We know from former General Janice Karpinksi, who was at Abu Ghraib and who found a memo signed by Rumsfeld authorizing torture techniques. Of course, when all the allegations about torture began to emerge, Rumsfeld sought to evade any responsibility. When 60 Minutes called the Pentagon to say they had pictures of abuses at Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon held them off for three weeks by appealing to their patriotism. During that time, Larry Di Rita, Rumsfeld's chief of staff, set up a crisis team of PR professionals from inside and outside the Pentagon. They devised the fall back defense that the abuses were committed by a bunch of hillbillies from Cumberland County, Maryland. It was all designed to shift responsibility from the secretary of defense.

3. We now know that the Bush Administration received repeated warnings before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning a major strike in the United States. How did Rumsfeld respond to those warnings?

By dismissing them. Even the CIA realized there was something in the wind. In July of 2001, CIA Director George Tenet gave a briefing to then–National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that warned that Bin Laden was preparing a major attack on the United States. By some accounts, Rice took the warning seriously. Rumsfeld just dismissed it. An intelligence source I spoke with told me that Rumsfeld described it as “vast doses of Al Qaeda disinformation” and accused the CIA of “mortal doses of gullibility.”

4. Your book contains new information about the Pentagon's efforts to spin the Iraq war. How extensive was that operation and how much success did it have?

The underlying approach used by the Pentagon was “information dominance”—you produce so much news that you satiate the media's requirement for information. You supply it all. They'd bring in retired military officers for briefings at the Pentagon and give them information that had not yet been released. These guys would speed away to Fox and sound incredibly knowledgeable. They were allowed to be a little bit critical, but if they became critical of whole enterprise they'd be cut off. Some of the retired generals were making good money on consulting deals with the networks and they were obviously reluctant to risk that. A person on staff at the Pentagon's public affairs office told me that he was looking at a bank of TVs in the office at the start of the war and he saw that every single talking head was one of “our guys.”

5. Rumsfeld famously opposed deploying a larger invasion force to Iraq. Did the failure to do so seriously undermine the occupation, or was the debacle in Iraq inevitable?

On this, he gets a bum rap. Rumsfeld has become the whipping boy for all the failures of the occupation because he wanted to send a small force. That's true—but the whole operation was doomed anyway. Look at what happened when they did have enough troops—it was the performance of the 82^nd Airborne, one of the better divisions, that turned Fallujah into an insurgent city. They had a base called Camp Mercury. Soldiers who felt frustrated were encouraged to take it out on prisoners who were held at a compound inside the base. And in April of 2003 they opened fire on a crowd of people who were demonstrating to regain control of a schoolhouse. I don't see how having more troops there would have made the Iraqis love us any more.

6. Rumsfeld often spoke of his desire to “transform” the defense establishment. How did that campaign go?

Rumsfeld disliked the Army and wanted to decrease the power of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In his business career he would always call in outside consultants, so that's what he did at the Pentagon. He adopted the “neoconservative/contractor” agenda for reforming the Department of Defense. It was a fantasy of high-tech video-game warfare. At one point there were dozens of groups studying “transformation”; one insider told me that they were “breeding like drunken muskrats.” The armed services ran rings around Rumsfeld, because he had no sustained strategy and didn't know where he wanted to go. A senior general said Rumsfeld's plan was to have all notions translated into bumper stickers. So it went nowhere. The only system he ever canceled was the Crusader, an artillery system, and that was promptly replaced by a system that was even more expensive and useless. But it worked out well for the contractors. Since 2001, the Spade Defense Index, which tracks defense-industry stocks, has risen by 103 percent.

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