I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing Andrew Coburn.
Of course, he is Washington editor of Harper's Magazine, brother of the great Patrick Coburn and the late, great Alexander Coburn, of course, and boy, is he an author.
Dangerous liaison, the inside story of the U.S.-Israeli covert relationship out of the ashes, the resurrection of Saddam Hussein, co-authored with Patrick, the threat, debunking the threat of the Soviet Union at the dawn of the Reagan years, even way back then, and my favorite and so important in our subject today, Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy.
Welcome back to the show, Andrew.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
It's great to be with you, as always.
Yes, absolutely.
Great to have you back on the show again, and we have cause to celebrate.
Donald Rumsfeld no longer exists.
I know.
Isn't it great?
I mean, a lot going wrong in the world, but we, as you say, we have reason to cheer the little fellow, and always remember he's little, five foot eight, except when he was wearing his elevator shoes.
Hey, I'm five foot eight.
I just have a picture of the two of us, and you're a solid head taller than me, at least.
But anyway, yeah, we deserve some good news.
Yeah, we do.
We do.
And this has been a long time coming.
I mean, I'm just thinking about him, and people are talking about his legacy, which includes, obviously, a ruined Iraq, some prisoners still rotting away in Guantanamo, but let's not forget aspartame, the sweetener that he managed to unleash on the world, which has the side effect, well, the proven side effect of giving brain cancer to rats, and the quite probable side effect of giving brain cancer to anyone, any of the rest of us who use it.
I say that should definitely, the rising number of brain cancer deaths in the US and the world should be traced to Donald Rumsfeld.
Yeah.
You know, by the way, so that is a huge part of the book, his work for this company in getting this stuff approved in the 1990s, I think it was, right?
Or in the 80s?
80s.
Yeah.
Well, he finally managed to, I think, just bribe enough of the incoming of the Reagan people to approve it.
The Carter FDA never would, but, you know, he got it through in the end.
And then, have there been any studies since then?
I mean, humans have been taking it for 30 years now.
I'm sorry, the book in which the figures are contained is actually propping up my laptop as we speak, so I can't open it.
But yeah, there were studies done in the 90s, and actually, when I wrote the book, I mean, back, you know, a little while ago now, in the early 2000s, I mean, people had traced an appreciable increase in brain cancer, brain cancers in the US population to aspartame.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just going from memory, because I think the book was published in like 2007 or so.
Yeah.
But from memory, I mean, it was a whole corrupt deal where the company that he worked for and their law firm basically just bought up all the regulators and ran the clock out.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, they had them, the company was, you know, straight up and down guilty of faking lab tests.
I mean, they, you know, they were just doing it.
I mean, it was well documented, no doubt about it.
They were facing criminal indictment.
And they simply kept buying up prosecutors from the, you know, if you're a prosecutor in the US Attorney's Office, and you were on the case, very shortly afterwards, you got a got a very enticing call from the from the corporation lawyers.
The corporation was called G.D. Searle.
And, you know, they jumped ship.
So they, you know, prosecution never went anywhere.
A laughably simple maneuver, really.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we only have half an hour.
So let's talk about wars and all this horrible stuff.
But let's go back to the 1970s when he came in.
I forgot what his position was under Nixon, but he got promoted to chief of staff when Gerald Ford took power after Nixon resigned in 74, correct?
Right.
He'd been very lucky.
He was in the Nixon White House and he was Nixon gave him a job running the the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was basically his basic assignment was to get rid of something called the Office of Legal Services, which was a great society creation, basically allowing the government to sue corporations on behalf of poor people, to take poor people's cases.
And the Republicans really hated that.
And so Rumsfeld was put in to get rid of it, which he did or emasculated, at least.
And then he was put in charge.
He had another job running Nixon's price controls.
But they and Nixon paid him a great honor, called him a slimy, a ruthless little bastard coming from Nixon.
Words of high praise.
But he pissed off some of the other Nixon sort of honchos, you know, Ehrlichman and Haldeman.
Some of us are old enough to remember them.
And so they got rid of him and sent him off to be ambassador to NATO, which was lucky for him because he missed out on Watergate.
So while the rest of them were going to jail, he was free and clear.
And so he, you know, managed to weasel his way into Gerald Ford's good graces, whom he'd known from the Congress.
And so when Ford gets in, he's chief of staff.
And then he spends his entire time there sort of maneuvering and intriguing, really to get his ambition was to get on the ticket in 1976 with Ford in the vice presidential slot.
And then he was going to run for president in 1980.
So everything he did was really oriented toward that.
And that was probably the best thing that he ever did in his life.
Right.
Was get Nelson Rockefeller fired and away from the White House.
Well, right.
Yeah.
And Rockefeller, I always remember, while he was hard at work at this, when he was chief of staff, Rockefeller used to whenever he went by his office, would poke his head around the door and said, you know, Don, you're never going to be president.
That certainly turned out to be true.
So he got rid of Nelson.
I agree.
Absolutely no loss.
He also he thought that George Bush senior might be his, you know, was his rival.
So he got rid of him by sending him to the CIA.
And then he made himself secretary of defense and really launched, you know, it's very it was really a prequel to what he did with, you know, in the later second appearance as secretary of defense, because he invented a wholly or really propelled a wholly spurious intelligence.
Later on, it was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
First time around, it was, you know, the Soviet threat is growing.
They're going to be all over us.
And we have to, you know, vastly increase the pump, pump money into the defense industry right now.
And he really kicked off a process which has really continued to this day, which was, you know, peacetime.
You know, they just finished the Vietnam War.
So the budget, you know, had gone down a bit.
You know, they didn't have to have half a million soldiers in Southeast Asia anymore.
So but very shortly under Rumsfeld auspices ticked up again.
And you know, that really started the tradition of, you know, peace breaks out, increase the budget, which is what they did.
And it's continued really to this day.
I call it part of his legacy, another part of his legacy.
OK, hang on just one second.
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All right.
Now, famously, there's video and still pictures of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq in 1983 there in Baghdad.
Why was Donald Rumsfeld in Baghdad there in 83?
Because they'd given him a Reagan, the Reagan people, they didn't like him that much, but they'd given him the job of special Middle East envoy.
And his main job in that capacity was to reassure Saddam.
I mean, the Iran-Iraq war was going on and the U.S. was prepared to do anything to help Iraq, to help Saddam Hussein, to not let the Iranians win.
So he went to part of that, Rumsfeld goes to Baghdad.
And it's interesting because, you know, no one, it's been very hard to find anyone who actually liked Donald Rumsfeld.
He was such an unlikable, nasty person.
And yet Saddam liked him.
I mean, that handshake, that friendly grins in those famous photographs were genuine, I think.
And they really did like each other, which says a lot for both of them, I suppose, I mean, tells you a lot about both of them.
And while there, you know, he was there to, you know, to reassure Saddam that they would, but he was, you know, that they were going to support him till the end.
And also, though the Iraqis did complain a bit that he spent all his time hustling, you know, private side deals, trying to make money for himself.
And also proposing that the Iraqis sell oils, you know, build a pipeline which would ultimately pipe oil to Israel, which, you know, the context of those days was completely ludicrous.
And he also carried a message from the Israelis to Baghdad offering to sell them arms.
The Israelis, remember, were busy selling arms to Iran and the Israelis saw no reason why they shouldn't also sell arms to Iraq.
And he handed, he tried to give this letter to the Iraqi foreign minister who refused to accept it, saying if he even touched the letter, Saddam would have him executed.
I mean, you had to remember that Donald Rumsfeld was basically dumb.
He really was a kind of a pretty stupid guy, as well as being horrible and horrible in every way.
Yeah.
And then I'm trying to remember now, I did so much research for the book, it's all blurring together.
But and I think this may have been something that you had written separate from the book, but somewhere else.
I'm sorry, I can't remember for sure, but it was about how he spent an inordinate part of that discussion, trying to get Saddam to approve the pipeline to, is it Cuba, Jordan?
How do you say it?
The idea was it would go to Jordan and there would be a sort of branch line would run off of that to to Israel.
And you know, there was no way on earth that Saddam was ever going to let his oil go anywhere but directly through Iraq to the sea.
And certainly never, ever even possibly think about, you know, sending it to Israel.
So there was a pipeline, there was a pipeline to Palestine during the days of the British king.
Right.
So that was why they were always wanting to recreate this thing that was possible.
You know, metaphysically speaking.
Oh, yeah, there was no physical reason why you shouldn't have it, but plenty of good political reasons.
I mean, you think you think Saddam was going to let the Israelis have control, partial control of his oil exports?
I don't think so.
But this was part of the same set of promises that Ahmed Chalabi had made to the neoconservatives about how great it's going to be once we get rid of Saddam Hussein.
The new Iraq will be allies with Israel and rebuild the water and oil pipeline to Haifa.
Yeah, exactly.
They they did.
I was wonderful.
They were pretty stupid, too, all the neoconservatives, Wolfowitz and all those people.
I think I was thinking about this today, but I think I was remembering it's it's in my book, actually, that General Zinni, Anthony Zinni, who'd been, you know, had been the commander in the Gulf before the war, was a critic of the whole idea of the invasion.
He was a four star marine general.
I mean, he once said to me, and I think I'm sure this is right.
He said that the real end purpose of the neocons was to destroy Iraq.
I mean, what happened was actually really fitted in with the plan.
You know, like the plan has always been the objective has always been to really destroy any sort of working Arab country anywhere near Israel.
You know, not with Jordan, but they got that under control.
But, you know, like so they destroyed Iraq with the invasion and they now destroyed Syria.
They've also kind of pretty much destroyed.
I mean, Lebanon is pretty much non-functioning anymore.
So I think, you know, I don't think the neocons, although they may have had this sort of sort of perhaps thought it'd be a nice idea to get, you know, that Iraq, you know, a post invasion Iraq, post Saddam, Iraq would actually pump oil to Israel.
Maybe they maybe they half believe that.
But then I think they were perfectly happy with the way things turned out.
Yeah.
Plan A, it'll be easy.
Plan B, we'll just burn the whole place to the ground.
Exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so now we're skipping ahead to Iraq war two, though, because that is what happened, as we all know.
But I want to go back to something that is just so much fun to read about in the book.
And that is Rumsfeld playing the president during the 1990s continuity of government exercises, the war games that they have there.
Where I think as you write it, he blew up the world every time the whole.
Yeah, he yeah, whenever he got the chance, you know, it was, you know, nuclear go nuke right now immediately.
I mean, it's I mean, it's pretty funny, but it's also kind of scary.
I mean, it is scary to think that this sort of fantasies to this, you know, malign fantasies who got to play all these games in the 90s, you know, then became secretary of defense and was in charge of all these weapons for whatever it was, six years.
Very scary indeed.
But yes, I mean, just to people to remember, they have this as this whole very elaborate and expensive program called continuity of government, which was, you know, reports to sort of the training for the day after the holocaust, the nuclear holocaust.
And, you know, we've nuked them and they've nuked us that, you know, how the government can keep going and can instruments of control and keep going, which involves very elaborate preparations to stick the leadership in deep holes, deep underground shelters where they can run the war and then run this postwar society.
And they practice this all the time.
And in the 90s, two people who are regularly a very regular part of these practice runs were Don Rumsfeld and his good friend or his friend Dick Cheney.
And, you know, as I read in the book, Cheney, you know, he had other things to do.
He was running a big corporation.
So he didn't always turn up at Rumsfeld every time, didn't matter what he was doing.
He would, the moment he got the call that, you know, we need you for another exercise, he would drop everything, disappear from his office, not tell anyone where he was going and, you know, go off to some secret hell on the ground where he would practice blowing up the world again.
Yeah.
And if I remember right in the book, you talk about, I think you quote people who are involved in it with him saying that, you know, they would have a game design to where we have off ramps from full scale war where, OK, you guys nuked Paris and we nuked St. Petersburg, but we're going to stop right there now.
And then but no, he would always just keep dropping H-bombs until it was full scale general war, right?
Right, right, right.
I mean, I tell the story, it was someone I knew or know who was a senior.
He'd been a senior U.S. diplomat who played and was recruited for this game and played the secretary of state.
And he was determined to not prevent Rumsfeld blowing up the world.
And this guy was a very canny bureaucratic infighter himself and diplomat.
So he actually managed to stave off, you know, to prevent Rumsfeld blowing up the world.
And Rumsfeld never forgave him, you know, so it was his determined enemy for that forever after.
I mean, just shows what an absurd figure this this guy was.
Yeah.
And how great we're rid of him.
Yeah, for sure.
All right.
So now here's something really important I learned in your book, if I remember it right again, we're talking 14 years ago.
I read the thing, but I got a good memory for stuff that happened a long time ago.
Anyway, stuff I read a long time ago.
And so this goes to Dan Coats and his interview, Senator Coats and his interview to be secretary of defense.
And if I remember it right, he told Bush and Cheney, ah, come on, missile defense.
Well, that's a big boondoggle and a waste of money.
We don't want to do that.
And they said, oh, well, right, there's the door and we won't be seeing you later, pal.
And then Cheney said, well, I got a guy we could bring in Don Rumsfeld.
So this was not Cheney's plan all along.
They were going to have kind of this run of the mill secretary of defense, which, by the way, you just pick an average Midwestern Republican senator.
They might be much less likely to go along, you know, at least full scale.
The way Rumsfeld was an absolute full partner with Bush and Cheney and getting us into Iraq War II.
I don't know about Coats.
I don't know anything good about him, but he can't be possibly as as cruel and cynical and capable as Rumsfeld was in getting us into that war.
But so can you just talk a little bit about the dynamic there and how he got the job in the first place working for W. Bush?
Well, right.
Well, you know, it's curious, first of all, that he got the job because he and Father Bush hated each other.
Well, certainly Father Bush hated him.
And, you know, he'd I tell the story how back in 1980, 88, 89, when Father Bush was becoming president and someone discovered a letter in the in his in the files, which was from Rumsfeld to the incoming president saying, Dear President-elect Bush, I would like to be considered for the post of ambassador to Japan.
Rumsfeld wanted a job and across it was scrawled.
It's a big marker, magic marker, no exclamation mark.
This will never happen.
Double exclamation mark.
So DGHWB, that was Bush Senior.
So Bush Senior didn't like him at all.
So it was always very interesting that Bush Jr.gave him this huge job.
And as you say, the reason was they thought they were going to have this fellow Coates.
And, you know, as always, it's always interesting reading the stories of how people get appointed to big jobs and a new president comes in.
You know, it's almost a sort of haphazard process.
You know, it's like they've been so concentrated on winning the election that they have to hurriedly think, oh, gosh, we're going to make this and that.
I mean, Kennedy going back a bit further in the past.
I mean, if you read about that, he sort of appointed all the people who got us into Vietnam in like an hour, you know, after like two minutes conversation.
So anyway, so they're going to appoint this guy Coates.
And as you say, Coates blew his chance by saying he didn't think much of the idea of missile defense, which was like a core belief of the whole sort of neocon, I mean, Bush sort of defense mindset.
Well, actually, you know, core belief of the defense industry who figured out how much money they could make out of it.
So he'd blown his chances.
So everything was very late anyway, because of the, you know, because of the whole thing with Florida and Gore and the court case.
And so they were having to move in a hurry.
And so they, you know, Cheney said, well, you know, how about Don Rumsfeld?
So Rumsfeld, who, you know, anyone who'd been thinking about him must have been thinking, well, at least, thank God we've got, you know, we're not going to see Don Rumsfeld anymore because he basically he tried to run for president.
It would be not a flop.
He tried to run for president again and another didn't get anywhere.
So he was kind of past it.
And he'd got himself on a few sort of presidential threat inflating commissions, saying that North Korea was, you know, existential threat.
But really, no one took him that seriously.
Suddenly, they cast you around and think, OK, we'll make him secretary of defense.
And I always remember that the someone I had a good informant who knew him quite well in the Republican hierarchy.
I didn't like him much, but he said he met Rumsfeld at one of the inaugural balls, you know, the night before Bush's or the night that Bush was inaugurated.
And he said, you know, met him at the door and he said, oh, well, congratulations, Don.
And Rumsfeld said, so shook his fist, said, can you believe it?
Can you believe it?
I've got another chance.
And this was, you know, this is he's finally, finally, you know, he'd been, you know, decades before he'd been secretary of the youngest secretary of defense.
Now he's going to be the oldest one.
And, you know, there he arrived.
But actually, as usual, he didn't really know what to do.
I mean, I had a good account of the meeting with these close advisors after he moves into the office.
And he sort of, you know, they had sort of a few half-baked ideas.
And then he announced he was going to transform the military, which didn't go anywhere.
The military sort of saw him off, you know, the smarter bureaucrats than him at protecting themselves.
And they, it's one of the reasons that Iraq happened.
You know, they thought, well, you know, we don't, you know, he's not, we can stop him.
We're stopping him doing the things we regard as important, like controlling weapons contracts, which they basically managed to sort of blunt him on that or kick him off on that.
So, goddammit, if they want to invade Iraq, why the hell not?
We'll get some money out of it.
You know, sort of they let that go by and made no real serious effort to stop it, which was a pity.
So, Andrew, and I'm sorry, because we only have like, you know, four and a half minutes here or something for Iraq War Two, which is unfortunate.
But maybe we go a little bit long.
But what was really his motive for Iraq War Two?
I mean, Bush obviously wanted to get reelected and show up his old man.
Dick Cheney owed Halliburton a couple of billion dollars because he bought Dresser Industries right before they got held responsible for a bunch of billions of dollars worth of asbestos claims.
And so that all makes sense.
Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle wanted to destroy Iraq for Israel, as you say.
But why was Rumsfeld so close to Paul Wolfowitz?
They had a preexisting relationship.
He was part of PNAC, right?
And what was his motive to be so determined to to have Richard Perle's position on invading Iraq in 03?
Well, it gave him, you know, it meant he could be well, I think the various things were in play here.
One, I mean, he could run and be in charge of an invasion.
He got to boss the military around, which he liked doing, and, you know, interfered with all their invasion plans and, you know, in a wholly sort of destructive way, not that it would have made much difference to the end result.
Also, I think there's another factor we should bear in mind, which is, you know, remember, they had really let 9-11 happen.
You know, we know that Richard Clarke and they were getting warnings all the time saying, hey, you really ought to watch out.
You know, this could be a big terrorist attack coming.
And they pooh poohed all that.
I mean, you know, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Rice, the whole gang, because they were had other things in mind or whatever.
So, you know, they were all kind of there, you know, then, you know, the morning of 9-11.
Oh, my God.
You know, there's a disaster.
We have really they had really screwed up.
And I think even for this bunch of dimwits, that was apparent.
So, you know, as we know, I'm sorry, just to clarify here real quick, and we're going to have to follow up and finish this interview like later this afternoon or something, because we just don't have time.
But to be clear here, you're saying they deliberately let it happen or they were just so intent on on Iraq that they were not looking at Osama.
Looking at it, you know, that, you know, there was the famous presidential intelligence brief that said, you know, terrorist attack on on the U.S. extremely likely quite soon.
That was the headline or something like that, which they just completely ignored.
So so they knew they were, you know, they were on thin ice here.
So from Rumsfeld, we know that Rumsfeld by two thirty in the afternoon of 9-11, Rumsfeld was, you know, making, you know, sketching out how they were going to be able to blame this all on Saddam Hussein and attack Saddam.
And I think that's very good.
He was getting them off the hook in various ways.
Yeah.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
And we do have right there in Stephen Cambone's handwriting, sweep it all up, things related and not get Jim Haynes, the lawyer, to talk with Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, about putting together evidence to tie Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda and knowing that Wolfowitz was a fellow traveler with Laurie Milroy and that entire line of crap from the 90s that that Al-Qaeda is just a front for the Mubarak.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's, you know, it was insane.
But I think they, Wolfowitz, you know, I always thought Wolfowitz was pretty, well, all of them, but Wolfowitz was kind of stupid.
I mean, maybe it's for another time, but some stuff I sort of never got around to putting in the book about Wolfowitz, which is quite interesting about his background, which we can discuss at some point.
All right.
Well, some time is now.
Well, you just heard that was all Friday.
Now it's Monday and we're following up finishing this interview with Andrew Coburn.
And so where we left off was Paul Wolfowitz, the smartest guy in the room.
OK, compared to Wormser and Cheney and Richard Pearl, maybe actually not so bright, you think, huh?
Well, what I was thinking of was his father.
His first name, I forget, was a very brilliant mathematician.
He taught at Cornell and, you know, people I know, people who studied under him who said he was, you know, he was a great mathematician and a brilliant teacher.
And he really, really and Paul aspired to follow in his footsteps.
And he really wanted little young Paul to to follow on.
And just Paul couldn't measure up.
I mean, couldn't do the math, I guess, is the way you can put it.
I mean, there's no disgrace.
I mean, you know, I certainly can't do I'm hopeless at math.
But so I guess it's a bit unfair to say he was stupid just because he couldn't do higher mathematics to an incredibly high standard.
But that's I mean, it is something not so much attesting to his stupidity, to attesting to his character, that this is a guy who went through has gone through life knowing that he was a great disappointment to his father.
So had to prove himself in other ways.
And his father, for example, his father, apart from being a brilliant guy in the mathematics and a brilliant teacher, was also very hard over Zionist, you know, a great, you know, on the extreme end, though maybe anyway, a very extreme hard line supporter of Israel and everything it felt like doing.
So that's something that Paul could pursue and did pursue.
And we know from his, you know, from his subsequent career and his his staunch, you know, membership of the people for what they call Project for a New American Century, which, you know, then sort of the not the founding document, but a core document for the the neoconservative movement and his efforts to embroil America in the Middle East to the benefit of Israel.
I think that all has to be sort of factored in when you think about Paul Wolfowitz and the disasters he inflicted on the world.
Yeah, you know, Andrew Bacevich once wrote a thing.
Now that I think about it, you may have published it at Harper's.
And it was about how he had dinner with Paul Wolfowitz in 1982 or some kind of thing.
And I guess he had predicted Saddam's coup in Iraq or something like that.
He had some feather in his cap about what he thought was going to happen with Iraq that everyone said, oh, wow, Paul Wolfowitz was right about something one time and how then he just wore that, you know, like Petraeus with all those medals on his chest that he didn't really earn, you know, kind of thing like it just became a thing he had to live up to in a way that he was the smart guy who just could game out.
He knew, you know, exactly what was going to happen and how it was going to be so great.
Well, he might, I mean, he might have had inside knowledge.
I mean, you know, it's not something that really has never been properly investigated, which is the whole relationship of Saddam and the CIA.
I'm not sure what coup was Bacevich and I'd have to go back and find the article, but the Wolfowitz was talking about that dinner.
But I do know that the going back a bit further in history, I remember in 1968, there was a coup in Iraq that overthrew the monarchy and this sort of leftist, it was a leftist military coup.
General Qasem took power, who by all accounts was not a bad guy and actually, you know, did a lot for Iraq.
But in 1963, he was displaced and killed by a Ba'athist coup, the first Ba'athist coup, I think 63, 62.
And I remember the former head of the CIA Middle East, whatever you call it, division, Jim Critchfield, he was called, him telling me, he said, we had, we consider that one of our best coups.
We had every T crossed and every I dotted on that one.
So, and that was, you know, when Saddam and his gang, I mean, although he was a slightly, he was not the absolute leader at that point, it was when they first got into power.
So, sorry, it's kind of a long digression.
So, when Paul Wolfowitz says, oh, I was able to predict a coup, maybe because his chums in the agency had told him, as you say.
Yeah, it wouldn't be surprising at all.
And the Americans really did.
When you were reporting, I know, on the Soviet Union right around that same time, but I, you know, which goes to show at least you were around and paying attention at that time that the Americans quickly embraced Saddam's coup in 1963.
They quickly embraced Saddam's coup in 79, didn't they, the Carter government?
I did.
I mean, they, you know, and remember, they, you know, the next year he invaded Iran with having gotten the clearance, the old clear from Washington.
He got the Saudis to ask the Americans, which would have been Carter, if it was okay for him to attack Iran.
And they, you know, Carter and Brzezinski being sort of idiots themselves, thought it was a fine idea because they thought, you know, their big idea was Saddam would therefore need the US, sorry, Iran, the Iranians would then need the US to help them out, you know, against this lethal attack from Saddam and therefore would free the hostages, which was not what happened at all.
And when the Iranians fended off Iran, Saddam quite effectively and, you know, the terribly bloody eight year war followed.
So, um, you know, so, uh, yeah, I should go back and look at that interview of that, whatever Bacevich wrote about, uh, about Wolfowitz, because I think probably a lot could be a lot more to that boast than meets the eye.
Yeah, uh, it's interesting.
I think it's written like as an open letter to him, if I remember it right.
It's like, dear Paul, now that we're looking back at all this, sure did screw everything up, didn't you, buddy?
Kind of thing.
Oh, but you know, so here's another place where we left off when we were talking before was why exactly was Rumsfeld all in on the Iraq war?
I mean, I have a easy explanation or two or three for W.
Bush and for Karl Rove and for Dick Cheney.
It's my belief that Dick Cheney was in debt deep to the gangsters in Houston for helping drive Halliburton into the ground, buying dresser industries.
I think I said that the other day, um, and so he had to pay them back with some fat government contracts quick, you know, kind of thing.
And, uh, so that makes sense for him.
That's the purloined letter as the war criminal Juan Cole once said, but anyway, um, but for Donald Rumsfeld, it's not like he's one of these born again, Southern Baptist from Alabama who believes that, you know, you got to serve Israel or else God will punish you or whatever nonsense people are taught.
Uh, and so, yeah, and I know that he liked exercising power over the Pentagon, but what does Iraq really have to do with that?
Or what was it that made him think that, yeah, this is what I want is Wolfowitz to be my deputy and him and Pearl and fight.
We're going to do this thing.
You know, that seems like a really dumb decision for the guy to make, but there must have been a real reason for it.
I guess I never was the transformation thing.
Think about the context.
First of all, you know, America had been bombing Iraq, you know, for years.
Clinton had bombed Iraq throughout his presidency.
You know, every so often they'd, you know, launch a few bombs or a few cruise missiles.
So it had become kind of a Washington habit, you know, irrespective of administration to attack Iraq.
Um, that's one thing to remember.
The second thing to remember is that the day, you know, Rumsfeld, as of the morning, you know, sort of 6, 7 a.m. on September 11, Rumsfeld was a failure as defense secretary.
I mean, he'd come in with a, uh, you know, this grand announcement he was going to transform the military and the military had really beaten him.
You know, no transformation had taken place.
No transformation was going to take place.
You know, all he was doing, all he really succeeded in doing was making money on his defense.
He refused to sell until he'd been in office for, uh, eight months.
So, um, you know, and he made this bitter speech on September 10th to the Pentagon saying that the Pentagon bureaucracy was the greatest national security threat fighting the United States.
It was a very sort of bitter, angry, peevish, you know, sort of really consent confession of failure.
That was on September 10th.
So September 11th, suddenly, bang, they'd be an attack.
They can, you know, now be at war.
And who's the most convenient sort of thing to go to war with?
Um, you know, Iraq, that's what we do is that America has been doing, and they thought it would be easy.
You know, what did he say?
Run the whole thing up.
Yeah, that's a sweep it all up.
Sweep it all up.
Yeah.
The other thing to remember is that they, you know, it had come as a very, they don't have a very nasty realization, hit them about 930 AM or 10 AM on the morning of September 11th.
Not just Rumsfeld, but, you know, Cheney and Bush and Rice and rest of them, which is they've been told this was going to happen.
Remember that this was, uh, Richard Clarke had been, uh, you know, had been sort of trying to, you know, what do we think of him?
He'd been saying, you know, if there's a major terrorist attack coming, it has been.
And Kofor Black too.
You know, this is Gareth Porter.
I talked with Gareth Porter.
I think this was off the air, but I don't think it was like a secret personal conversation or something.
We're just talking all about, you know, the how it was exactly that they were able to ignore all this information about Al Qaeda for the first eight months on the job.
And, you know, I guess I was playing the devil's advocate for, you know, Prince Bandar and Dick Cheney and, and these guys were deliberately helping facilitate the thing and wanted the attack to get through or something.
And Gareth is saying, no, no, no, dude.
See, it's real simple.
And it's just the same as after the attack, the way the open conspiracy then was to try to pin it on Saddam somehow.
Well, that was the conspiracy before the attack was, Mr. President, don't listen to these CIA idiots who are telling you that it's all about Osama in Afghanistan.
Because if we go after Osama in Afghanistan, then we're going to get stuck there.
And how are we going to go to Baghdad?
And keep your eye on the prize, the prize of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
What are these Al Qaeda guys going to do?
You know, they don't even have a country.
They're nobody.
And so and then that was enough.
Essentially, that was the blind eye.
It wasn't to deliberately allow the attack to take place, which they wouldn't have the balls to do that.
But they just didn't take it seriously.
And they didn't.
And they thought that taking it seriously would be a distraction from their big project, which was figuring out a way to go to Baghdad and get Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, I mean, granted, but the point is that, you know, the fact is, so meanwhile, then on September 11th, hey, there's warnings they've been ignoring or brushing aside, you know, it turned out to be real.
And they if that if it got spun that way, or, you know, they were going to be in big trouble.
I mean, they, you know, obviously should have all should all have been impeached immediately.
And I think they were rather conscious of that.
And so, you know, what kind of distraction than to have a war with somebody else?
So that was, I think, the other thing.
You know, the other factor, I think, was a lot of factors in play.
Why Rumsfeld?
And then, you know, it gave him a great opportunity to sort of once they were off and running great opportunity to boss the military around.
He loved doing that.
He loved to, you know, he when he he loved it.
And he had really forged his relationship with the neoconservatives when?
It was really in the 90s.
You can see it, you know, they put him on these.
Remember, at the beginning of the 90s, first of all, he'd been important thing, which I wrote to my book.
I know.
I mean, I had a very good source on it, but it was I don't see anywhere else, which is that, you know, Cheney, he and Cheney have been joined at the hip.
Cheney, he and Cheney have been joined at the hip since, you know, the Nixon administration when before when Rumsfeld had hired Cheney.
But and, you know, it's always the history is always recorded as saying that, you know, they went on being, you know, joined at the hip all the way through through Iraq and, you know, into the into that.
But actually, there came a moment in the 80s when Donald Rumsfeld was running again, you know, with his most serious effort.
And, you know, he was getting all the hard this is in Chicago and he called up Cheney saying, well, Dick, you know, I'm going to do it.
And I expect you by my side as usual.
And Cheney said, well, actually, no, Don, I've got other priorities.
I'll do anything for you, but not this.
I got other things to do and I'm kind of busy and I don't want to do this.
And actually, I think I believe Cheney was actually thinking of running himself at that point.
It was in 87 and Rumsfeld was very pissed off.
He got in a big huff about it.
And sort of one clue to that is it's a tradition when you're secretary of defense to invite the formers in, former secretaries of defense.
And he'll come around to lunch and, you know, have a, you know, can discuss issues of the day and whatever they want to talk about.
And it's kind of a ritual.
So Cheney did that when he was secretary of defense under Bush senior and Rumsfeld never showed up.
It's not clear whether he wasn't invited.
He had to.
If they invited the others, they had to invite him.
But Rumsfeld never came.
You know, he's such a sort of pet.
He was such a sort of petulant little man that, you know, this rebuff by Cheney.
But then, you know, the.
OK, so so just a long winded way of saying so he was kind of on the outs.
He was up with Cheney and he was kind of sort of in the wilderness a bit, Rumsfeld in the 90s.
And, you know, his default had always been to sort of, you know, the extreme hawkishness, spend more on defense.
You know, there's a big threat coming.
And that's, you know, I always had to have that's the key element of neoconservatism is a bigger defense budget.
So there was a natural gravitation.
And then they gave him these two commissions.
There was a commission on missile defense and a commission on the North Korean menace, you know, which was doing yeoman service even back then at a time when actually North Korea was basically starving.
But still, you know, we had to worry about the North Korean threat.
And they put Rumsfeld on both of those.
And he delivered, you know, it was very much a neocon agenda.
So I've been thinking about it.
I wouldn't I don't know if he was a neocon because I don't think I think he lacked all principles of ideology, really, apart from himself.
Right.
But he was certainly a neocon adjacent.
Sure.
Yeah.
He never was a Trotskyite like them.
But I think actually I remember from the book where you said he asked advice from his friend, should I be a moderate or a conservative?
And they says, oh, no, conservative is the wave of the future.
Man, you don't want to be a Rockefeller guy.
You want to be a Ronald Reagan guy.
Oh, OK.
If that friend had said, you know, said moderate, we'd have had, I don't know, a sort of Robert Robert Gates type secretary of defense, I suppose.
God help us all.
That would have been worse.
Well, we're skipping ahead.
But they fired him and replaced him with Gates because he wanted to finally get out of Iraq.
And Gates promised that he would double down.
But that's skipping ahead.
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But so, all right.
Iraq War II.
There's so much to this.
And I'm not sure which all parts to focus on.
But, well, I guess, can we start with as much as the CIA?
People downplay the CIA's role, but after all, they tortured lies out of innocent men or not entirely innocent men, but innocent of the lies they were tortured into saying to lie us into that war, the bastards.
But the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld had their own project to lie us into war under Douglas Fyfe in the expanded Iraq desk, the Office of Special Plans.
And so that, you know, that was a huge part of his responsibility.
And I know that that's the CIA side of the story, but it's still true because it's also Karen Kotowski side of the story.
And she saw it all happen right in front of her eyes as an Air Force lieutenant colonel.
But so can you talk a little bit about that?
Like, who is Douglas Fyfe and and how that worked for, you know, their cooperation with Iraqi exiles and all that?
Yeah, Fyfe was, they were really, I mean, Rumsfeld, he, you know, he always seemed to be, he always seemed to be, he regarded Fyfe with a certain, he was part of, you know, the help.
And they had this irritate, you know, they needed, Douglas Fyfe was this little sort of defense intellectual who, you know, was a true blue neocon believer.
So they, they said, you know, well, as you say, it was important.
I mean, the CIA did the heavy lifting because of the prestige of the name on, you know, drumming up the fake intelligence.
But the Office of Special Plans was also extremely useful, was there to sort of police up military intelligence.
And also, you know, Rumsfeld, you know, he, he didn't, he hated the CIA.
He hated them being, you know, he was such a sort of power, you know, sort of intolerant of any threat to his power.
So if someone else down the road or up the river is producing fake intelligence, well, he's going to have his own fake intelligence shop.
He's, he's going to compete.
That's the way he thought.
And so they, you know, they set up this operation and they did, you know, their own Yeoman service.
Yeah.
And Karen Katowski talked about how, you know, they'd be digging through essentially the CIA's trash and they had the terrorism policy evaluation, counterterrorism policy evaluate.
No, the policy, it's all the, it's not my fault, Andrew.
The name, the words are all out of order in the thing.
It makes no sense.
It's the policy terrorism, counterterrorism evaluation group, PCTEG, right?
Yeah.
Anyway, so that was across the hall and they were focused more on the ties to Al-Qaeda lies while Feith and his guys were working on the weapons of mass destruction there.
Good times.
Right.
And remember, you know, incidentally, a very important aspect of the whole torture business, which, you know, doesn't get talked about enough, which is, you know, you know, the standard, a standard critique against torture is, you know, people, the torture victims give you false information.
But the point of this, of the, you know, the torture program very largely was to get false information.
Remember, they were torturing people to attest that of ties between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.
I mean, they weren't being tortured to tell the truth.
They were being tortured to tell lies.
And that's something, it's an aspect of the whole sort of disgusting business, which I think, you know, deserves to be better remembered.
Yeah.
And you know what, just for people, there are a lot of people we're living so far in the future now that, you know, there are people who are way too young for this or just not interested at all, or they were on the wrong side of this back then and weren't paying attention.
But they tortured this guy, Ibn Alibi, into saying that Saddam had taught them how to hijack planes and make chemical weapons, including sarin.
And then they tortured Abu Zubaydah into claims that Al-Qaeda was working with Iraq and targeting different interests inside the United States.
And I think that one included big banks and stuff like that.
And then Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they tortured him to make it up.
And he actually is guilty of September 11th by all accounts I can, you know, all credible accounts I know of.
And yet they still tortured him into making up all kinds of crap.
So for people who don't remember about this, this is a really big deal.
I couldn't overstate it.
And for people who are old enough, they'll remember how all through the year 2002, orange alert, orange alert.
I was driving for a living.
So listening to talk radio with ABC, top of the hour radio news, orange alert, orange alert.
Al-Qaeda is planning an imminent attack with Iraq against American banks.
So all American banks should be on high alert or all American banks in New York and New Jersey, right?
We're like, oh, OK.
And then I forgot.
I guess Jane Mayer, somebody had one about how KSM had them chasing the Muslim Brotherhood around Montana or something where they never existed and just told them make believe crap.
But it was enough to keep the level of fear up for the public for an extra year for they could start their bonus war.
Yeah, it's I mean, it's it's it's amazing now to think back about, you know, remember those orange alerts, remember all that, all that madness that they produced.
You know, it's I mean, they were pushing on an open door.
I remember the first, you know, 1991 Gulf War when Saddam was firing scuds at Israel and Saudi Arabia.
There was a run on gas marts in California.
Do you remember that?
Just how, you know, how well prepared the ground was for sort of fake news.
I hate to use that term.
Yep.
And yeah, you know, there's there are a couple of good documentaries about this for people to go look at.
I guess probably the best one would be War Made Easy by Norman Solomon would include a whole lot of clips.
Oh, yeah.
That kind of really take you back to the spirit of that time of just total fear.
Countdown to war.
The inevitable conflict just on on as like a spinal tap says on volume 11, just turned up all the way, you know, on full brainwash mode.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
That's right.
And, you know, it was I mean, you know, the lessons of Gulf War one had been sort of well absorbed, like, you know, provide great video.
Remember all the video when they discovered figured out how to put a video camera in the nose of the missile or the bomb?
You know, that was so important.
And, you know, Rumsfeld had this very evilly smart publicity person, Victoria Clark, Tory Clark, and she was the one or she certainly I think it was her who thought up the idea of embedding, you know, that you basically you absorb journalists into into the military.
And, you know, as long as they promise to write, you know, mostly nice things and don't upset anyone, they can get to be up front and have an exciting time.
And that was a brilliant, brilliant PR breakthrough anyway.
And people would say, see, look, it's all completely transparent.
The reporters are embedded right there.
So but in fact, you know, as Robert Gates would say, war through a soda straw.
You're just looking at, wow, what a bunch of heroes and what a bunch of brave guys our infantry are.
And then that's the story.
But nobody's asking whose side they're fighting.
How come their guns are pointed the direction they're pointed at any given time or any of the real context?
Right, right, right.
You know, so the truly great war, you know, people covering the war like, you know, like Robert Fisk and, you know, my brother Patrick, you know, always refused to go along with the embedding, you know, stayed well clear of that.
Yeah.
All right now.
So you talk about how basically jealous Rumsfeld was of others power all the time.
And I'm pretty sure this is part of the story of the military's use of torture in Afghanistan.
Well, I think, yeah, it must have been first in Afghanistan and then Guantanamo Bay and then Iraq was part of it was competition with George Tenet that it ain't fair if the CIA gets to torture people.
I also want to torture people.
So and then I guess it was the White House that defined the Geneva Conventions to not apply to American behavior in Afghanistan.
Right.
And that applied to the not just the CIA, but for the military, too.
Right.
And actually, I just have an important point about Rumsfeld in torture, which was he got off on it.
Remember, I mean, I've actually in just a couple of days, a counterpunch ran an excerpt from my book, you know, about how he liked to micromanage torture.
Sure.
And, you know, remind people that when John Walker Lynn, the American Taliban, this sort of poor kid who found it to fight with the Taliban, got help him and got captured and was brutally tortured by the Americans, this American, you know, they strapped him naked to a gurney.
They put ice packs on.
I don't know.
They forgot put on all the grisly details.
But, you know, they had all the pain from Rumsfeld's office to the special forces who were holding him to, quote, take the gloves off, unquote.
And as they were, you know, pulverizing this poor kid, you know, the secretary of defense and the deputy, that's Rumsfeld and Wilkowitz, wanted reports every hour.
And you see that all the way through and what followed.
I mean, God, it was a guy in Guantanamo that that Rumsfeld wrote his famous, you know, signed off on on the methods to be used on this.
You've got an incredible memory.
You might remember Katani at Guantanamo, right?
Yes, Katani and Rumsfeld signs off on the on the sort of torture authorizing memo and puts at the bottom one of the things they're going to do to make him stand for hours and hours and hours and hours.
And Rumsfeld said, you know, so what?
You know, I stand 14 hours a day.
Of course, what he didn't mention was no one was making him stand.
And anyway, he also didn't mention which often never gets mentioned.
I did write about it.
He had specially padded shoes, you know, sort of very sort of thick with.
And could sit down whenever he wanted.
Built up to make.
Yeah, but he also even standing up wasn't so uncomfortable for him.
Sure.
You know, the duck shoes, as they call them.
So, you know, so that, you know, anyway, going on, you know, that there's this obsessive interest in the torture that he had.
It wasn't just something, you know, that, you know, said, OK, torture people and let me know if they tell you anything.
It was like being in constant touch.
What's happened now?
And then the poor guy.
Sorry, my brain is not as best today.
The poor guy they had locked up in the United States in the brig.
Oh, Jose Padilla.
Jose Padilla, the American born American citizen.
Yeah, and that was he was again, he was being locked up and tortured in, you know, in a cell in in a Navy brig and under the auspices of joint forces command, which was this thing that Rumsfeld had set up as a way of sort of managing, you know, was his big idea for transforming the military bureaucracy.
And he was trying out all sorts of not what he considered or he'd been sold as, you know, new novel approaches to warfare.
Which I think included, you know, the whole treatment of Padilla, you know, hey, you know, let's work out, you know, whole new methods of torture.
Yeah.
So and they certainly let the CIA have access to him there, too.
Yeah, exactly.
But it's anyway, Rumsfeld, as I say, he was he got off on torture.
He liked it.
Right.
Doing I mean, for other people.
Well, and, you know, Stanley McChrystal tortured people under his authority.
And, of course, the Abu Ghraib prison and Camp Bucca and all of that, you know, had torture going on, you know, through.
Yeah, I guess it was until I forgot if it was.
Would have been what, like the end of 03 or the beginning of 04.
So the spring of 04 was when Alberto Mora, the Navy lawyer, I think, demanded an end to the program or something like that, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I think I forget the chronology, but it was around then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, I remember talking with the other Scott Horton, your colleague at Harper's and professor of law at Columbia and international human rights lawyer.
He was a real expert on this back then.
Then I remember talking with him about how it was certain that tens of thousands of Iraqis were tortured by the Americans, you know, in their homes, on the side of the road, in dog cages and in prisons all over the place.
And then the military later admitted that 90 percent of all the people they ever arrested were innocent anyway, innocent of resistance against their invasion, assuming the guilt of that.
Yeah.
And let's not.
Yeah.
Tens of that's not that's not the common narrative, I guess.
Tens of thousands of things.
It was.
Yeah.
Sorry.
Yeah.
But I just want to point something out to you, which is this character, Eddie Gallagher, this SEAL, you may know I'm talking about this.
Yeah.
The war criminal from Iraq, this guy who was out of control and sort of, you know, sort of psychopathic.
Right, right.
He, you know, he's the charges against him included they tortured a prisoner to death or as he as he put it in a recent interview, we medically nursed him to death.
So, you know, that was when 2000 that's in the teens, 2013, 2014.
So, you know, it certainly didn't go away.
Almost certainly hasn't gone away.
Yeah.
And, you know, Colonel Wilkerson, who had been Secretary of State Colin Powell's right hand man and the Associated Press later had their own separate conclusion that 108 men had been killed in military custody.
That didn't include people who'd been killed or disappeared by the CIA, but just in military custody that there was 108 of them that they knew of.
And when I talked to Kiriakou, the CIA officer about that, he was like, boy, I bet the numbers a lot higher than that.
Yeah, well, he should know and I would agree, you know, I hope they wouldn't put in prison again for committing truth on that one.
Yeah.
You know what he said was and he was talking about CIA now, not not the military, but the CIA prisoners.
You know, I always wondered how many people just disappeared and weren't accounted for and just sort of, you know.
In other words, they they didn't die and get and, you know, they they weren't killed and the CIA got caught, like when Gul Rahman was frozen to death in the salt pit in Afghanistan or I think it was Jamadi, Abdul Jamadi was suffocated to death, hung from the ceiling with his arms behind his back in Abu Ghraib.
It was by the CIA, though, not by the military.
They got caught on those.
But Kiriakou is like, yeah, you know, I think there are people that we were transporting that just never got where they were going.
That kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think so.
Open the door on the helicopter.
So things.
Yeah, exactly.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right.
Now, so now here's the thing, too, about the wars.
Um, you know, the big narrative when people voted for W. Bush in 2000 was, look, I admit that this guy's a stupid idiot, but I'm so sick of the Clintons and all of their childish nonsense.
And we need the adults back in there, you know, and so Junior might be a dummy, but we got all his father's men like Colin Powell and Dick Cheney, and they're very sober and responsible and competent adults, and they'll know what to do.
But then every history I've ever read of the way that this government operated, the members of it operated, especially once the war began, was that they were a bunch of bickering, tiny children and that Rumsfeld and Powell and Connelly's arise all hated each other.
And they all kept waging the war, but all of them essentially refused to take responsibility for what was going on.
The president, of course, doesn't know his ass from his elbow and, you know, his left from his right.
So he's completely dependent on who, like Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security advisor, to somehow try to wring even a coherent policy out of this thing.
And Rice is begging Rumsfeld to please talk to Powell about what we're doing here.
And instead, he just tells the camera, hey, I don't know.
That's the State Department's job, not mine.
My job is just to fight the guys that I'm fighting and just total.
I mean, but then again, I mean, that's sort of just one point of view on the deal.
I don't know.
But that's the way it seemed to me, too, was that they, especially Rumsfeld, refused to take responsibility for what he was doing the whole time he was doing it.
Well, he refused to take responsibility for anything ever.
You know, he didn't take responsibility for the war.
He didn't take responsibility for the torture.
He didn't take responsibility for, you know, for missing out on the pre 9-11 warnings.
He didn't take responsibility for, you know, the intelligence, faking the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.
You know, I mean, again, actually, I'm reminded of a piece that's in The Guardian today.
He, you know, he, there was a big procurement, well, several, but I mean, one procurement scandal that surfaced during his time as secretary was an Air Force tanker contractor.
I mean, it was an absolute egregious example of corruption.
I think it was billions of $26 billion at stake here.
And he claimed that he said, oh, I didn't know anything about that.
I was too busy with the wars.
He said, I never see defense contractors unless I meet them at a party someplace.
You know, he, this is a guy who had it, you know, somewhere in a filing cabinet.
I've got a, I've got a list of his stock holdings that he held on to while he was set for defense in the first year.
And the very, you know, don't tell me he wasn't interested in defense contractors.
He owned a lot of them, big pieces of a lot of them, I should say.
Yeah.
Well, he died very rich.
That must have felt great.
Well, I was going to say the only way we were celebrating the fact that he was dead the other day, but it is, it is regrettable that he, you know, you never, I think he had to stop going to France because there was a warrant out for his arrest.
In fact, I'm not sure he could actually visit Europe at all.
You know, you know, it is a pity that he never got, he had his collar felt, as they say in England or in the States too.
You know, and was actually dragged into some kind of war, war crimes dock.
That would have been great and probably too much to hope for.
But still, it would have been nice.
Yep.
And it was, this is one of the big revelations in Manning and Assange's Wikileaks in the State Department cables was about pressure by the Obama government on the Spanish to rescind their warrants out for him, for torture.
Oh, that's right.
I'd forgotten that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Or, you know what, maybe I'm conflating two things.
That doesn't sound all the way right, does it?
It was, it was pressure on the Spanish to drop their warrant against somebody, but maybe it wasn't Rumsfeld.
Oh, we can both dig it up when we get it all.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I know.
So I'll ask you, we'll go back to the public relations campaign, because I have this in my notes, but I forgot to ask you about it.
Was, you know, during the whole run-up to the war, the way that he, you know, really got away with using all these generals to push his story on TV news in a way that made it seem like they were not there working directly for him when they really were.
And it wasn't really revealed until years later, right?
Right.
Well, actually, I had it in my book.
And I only sort of talked about it for a page.
I had all the details.
And then some fellow at the New York Times read my book, I think, and noticed that page and got an 8,000 word article and a Pulitzer Prize out of it.
So I'm more fooled me for not making more of it.
But yeah, he had all these, this whole, they had this whole cast of, you know, military eminences, retired generals who were all, who'd get regular briefings and, you know, the cable news channels and would spout their BS and, you know, and then, you know, they were on, they were on the, not exactly on the payroll, but they, you know, being, getting, achieving that level of prominence, got them directorships and consultancies and all the rest.
It was a very insidious and corrupt setup.
Yeah.
You know, I think if I remember right, McCaffrey had been part of it and he was a war criminal from Iraq War One, from the so-called battle, the massacre at Ramelia, and then was the drug czar under Bill Clinton, and then became a Bradley fighting vehicle salesman, I believe.
And then he was part of this program, but he one time said what he thought and disagreed with Rumsfeld on TV or something and got fired from it.
But I just saw him recently arguing that, well, no, we can't ever leave Afghanistan because then the bad guys would come back.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
He was just saying that within the last month or so.
Well, now, you know, now that, you know, we have left, we're all leaving, we're all Well, now, you know, now that, you know, we have left, we're all leaving, and, you know, there'll be lots of stories about the mayhem in Afghanistan and were we right to leave and beat up on Biden.
Yeah.
Well, and in a way, yeah, in a way, thank goodness it's Biden and not Trump that's getting us out, because last year they framed this all as treason and they put this trumped up story in Charlie Savage's garbage New York Times about the Russian bounties and all of these things.
And the fact that Biden is doing it is making them all bite their tongue and their criticism is really much more muted than it would be, I think.
So, yeah, they will, of course.
You know, unless Biden starts doing something, you know, sort of outrageous, like cutting the defense budget, which he won't.
Right.
Oh, by the way, so I did Google it, and I knew there was something wrong with the dumb thing that I said.
It was everybody but Rumsfeld in there.
The Spanish were they had indicted Gonzalez, Addington, Haynes, and Feith and Bybee and you.
So all the lawyers, but not the principals there.
And so that was what that was.
But close, though.
But anyway, well, listen, I really highly recommend your book, Andrew.
It's so good, everybody.
You got to read it.
It's a fun read, too, because this guy's a madman.
So he's entertaining in his in his way, you know, Rumsfeld, his rise, fall and catastrophic legacy by the great Andrew Coburn, Washington editor of Harper's Magazine.
Thank you so much for doing the show.
Great to talk to you as always, Andrew.
Oh, likewise.
Likewise.
It's always a pleasure.
Take care.
