04/12/07 – Andrew Cockburn pt.1 – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
This is Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, and I've been really looking forward to this interview for a long time, mainly because it's taken me forever to find a chance to get this book read.
Andrew is the author of five non-fiction books.
He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Playboy, Vanity Fair, National Geographic, among other publications, and currently lives in Washington, D.C.
Welcome to the show, Andrew.
Hi there.
Glad to be with you.
It's great to have you on, and what an accomplishment this book is.
Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy.
Boy, you got that right, huh?
Well, I hope so.
It's kind of hard to miss.
Well, I have to start this with a correction.
I've actually mischaracterized one of the stories that you broke, and there must be two dozen stories that you break in this book.
But I have misspoken, misstated one of the stories that you break in this book a couple of times on the air.
I misread it when I saw them summarize it on Slate, I guess, or something.
Because I've been telling my audience that it was in the summer of 2004, right before Bush was re-elected, that he finally asked his father, Dad, what's a neocon?
And yet, I read your book, and I had to do a double take and go back and check out the context from the two pages before and make sure that I could believe my eyes that you report in this book that it was in August of 2006, just last August.
Last summer, yeah.
Well, it's never too late to get enlightenment.
And that's when young George finally asked his father, you know, for those of you who haven't heard the story, he was up staying in Maine, and he said, Dad, what's a neocon?
And the father said, do you want names or a description?
And he said, I'll take a description.
And the father said, I'll give it to you in one word, Israel.
So now, I don't know if it's affected him in any way, it doesn't seem to change his course of action, but at least he now knows who it was who hijacked his administration.
Yeah, well, and it kind of, I don't know, I guess I spend too much time trying to imagine what's going on behind those closed doors, but could he have not asked Condoleezza Rice that three years earlier or something?
Well, he could have, he could have asked, yeah, he could have asked Laura, I'm sure.
Any number of people he could have asked.
He just never, you know, he's a very sort of incurious fellow, you know, you could, you know, all sorts of reports from meetings, people have met with him.
Or even occasionally, like the famous, you know, video of him before Katrina, where they're telling him, you know, there's a big storm coming, it's going to be pretty bad.
And he doesn't ask a single question.
Right, he just says, okay, you guys are doing a great job.
That's right.
He's a very sort of passive person.
He may or, or, you know, most famously of all, you know, my pet goat, you know, on the morning of 9-11, he just sits there frozen into inability.
Yeah, well, and speaking of AWOL on 9-11, that's how your book begins with Donald Rumsfeld doing everything but his job in order to go outside and be on TV.
That's right.
You know, as I say, I describe it as a typical day for Rumsfeld.
I mean, he, you know, he may, he didn't realize what was about to happen, even though his security guard did and was waiting outside the door.
And, you know, then he, then he neglected his wider responsibilities in favor of micromanaging something, was ineffectual, and got on TV, as you say.
I mean, let me spell it out a little more detail as I describe how, in the first chapter, how when the plane hit the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was inside having his normal CIA briefing, even though the, you know, obviously the country was, something was going on because of what has happened in New York.
Rumsfeld, you know, went on hearing his normal briefing, and then he popped out his security guard was outside because he figured that, you know, New York had been attacked, something was up, and the Pentagon might be a target, so he was a bit smarter than the boss.
And that is a bit remarkable, just that right there, isn't it?
That, well, if I remember right, the timing there, the plane didn't hit the Pentagon until, what, 40 minutes after the second plane had hit in New York.
That's right.
I mean, Rumsfeld knew it had happened, but he didn't seem to react in any way.
There's no record of him, you know, frantically calling, trying to get hold of Bush.
He just went on with his normal day.
It's just amazing.
Well, you can see why conspiracy theorist types would be pretty suspicious about that.
Well, that's right.
They don't know Donald Rumsfeld, you know, but he, no, you know, he, you know, then when he does, you know, when he comes out, he sets off, the guard says, oh, we've got a report that a plane hit the Mall Terrace, which is, it was one side of the Pentagon along from the River Terrace, which is where Rumsfeld's office was.
And Rumsfeld just sets off without a word, with his guard frantically chasing after him, and they sort of grope their way down.
You know, the place is filling with smoke and people screaming, running past and so forth.
And then, actually, it's the next Terrace along where the heliport is, and then he gets there, and Rumsfeld sort of wanders around, picks up bits of wreckage, and then, you know, does help, probably I want to give him the credit due credit, he does help carry one end, one corner of one stretcher.
Or push, you know, it was a gurney actually, push it across to the, to an ambulance.
And then, you know, then it sort of dawned on him that maybe he was in the wrong place, and he headed back to the office.
But meanwhile, the police radio was erupting with, you know, where's the secretary, where's Rumsfeld, he's disappeared from his staff.
And they couldn't get back to say, well, he's outside, you know, say where he was, because all the frequencies are jammed.
So he was, you know, he was absent, he was AWOL for, completely AWOL for 20 minutes.
And then for another half hour, he was off, he went off to a private meeting with these immediate aides, and didn't go to the National Military Command Center, which was frantically looking for him.
They were desperate to have him there, because it was certain things by law that only he could do.
He finally showed up at 10.30, so that's 50 minutes, effectively, or slightly over, more than that, he was, you know, it was completely off the picture.
So that's, you know, that's Don Rumsfeld for you, you know, ducking responsibility at every turn.
What things did he need to be there to approve of by law?
Well, he was the person who was meant to be ordering, you know, whether they should, you know, giving certain orders for dealing with, you know, attacking with hijacked planes, if necessary, shooting them down.
That was his, he was, there's a thing that, you know, was a product of the Cold War called the National Command Authority, which set up a different, basically a different and, you know, actually completely unconstitutional line of authority in the country, which is the second, the President, the National Command Authority is the President and the Secretary of Defense.
They, together, constitute that authority, and they have the right to launch the nuclear weapons, actually, because the whole thing was set up in, you know, with the thought of, you know, Russian missiles on their way, and you have minutes and maybe even seconds to give the order to push the button before everything goes up in smoke, or, you know, get out of town or whatever.
That's why 20 minutes is actually, in this context, is actually a long time.
And he was meant to be there to, you know, the order said that he was to be in the National Command Authority, and only he could give the order to shoot down planes, for example.
Well, he wasn't there.
Meanwhile, of course, Cheney, even more unconstitutionally, had taken the authority on himself, which he didn't really have, and he was ordering planes shot down right, left and center.
Luckily, none of them were, because Cheney, for all his macho swagger, has no idea how the military really operates.
And one thing he doesn't seem to have realized is that the military likes precise orders, and if you don't give the military precise orders, they won't carry it out, because they actually like to know what they're being told to do.
So he was saying, you know, take out this plane, and take out that plane, and was not, you know, they needed to know, well, under what circumstance, you know, are we to try and identify it by warning shots, all the things, you know, the pilots wanted to know.
So the air defense commanders, very sensitively, just didn't tell the pilot, didn't pass on Cheney's orders.
Meanwhile, and Rumsfeld was missing, you know, and then when Rumsfeld finally shows up, he spends the next hour and a half, no, two and a half hours, working out very precisely what the rules of engagement were.
Well, this, of course, is long after the last hijacked plane has gone down.
So, you know, it was a day like any other, completely irrelevant, pointless, he messed things up, and then he went and swagged about on television.
Yeah, and emerged a hero.
And emerged a hero, yeah.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Andrew Coburn, he's the author of the new book Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
Now, let's rewind a little bit, and go back to the Nixon-Ford years, and see if we can't figure out a little bit about this guy's background, who he is.
I guess, if we could, maybe you can address his butting heads with Henry Kissinger and the policy of detente that is cooling off with the Soviet Union.
Well, that's right.
I mean, the context was, Rumsfeld is chief of staff at the White House under Ford, when Ford takes over the White House, and Kissinger remains in the post he'd had under Nixon.
And as you say, pursuing the policy of detente, of arms, you know, limiting, or at least regulating the arms race.
They're going to agree on how many missiles they have of different categories.
All that good stuff, and there was a genuine relaxation of tension, which was a good thing.
I mean, you know, younger people now might not realize, you know, but of all those years, with these very irresponsible people in charge, we were in imminent risk of being incinerated at any minute.
So that was a good idea.
Rumsfeld, the basic thread is that Rumsfeld wanted very much, as he wanted most of his life, he really thought that the country needed him as president, that he was the best possible person for the job.
His strategy in the Ford administration was that he would get himself picked as Ford's running mate in the 1976 election.
So then he'd be vice president, and having done that, whether they won or lost, then he would run for president in 1980.
And in doing this, he has to cross Nelson Rockefeller.
Right.
There's a couple of little problems.
First is, there already is a vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, who had been appointed by Ford pretty soon after he got in.
He became president.
And the second problem is that Rumsfeld's only chief of staff for the White House, which is, you know, kind of just an apparatchik job, and, you know, he thought, you know, well, everyone thought that to have sufficient credentials to run, you needed to run a big cabinet department.
So Rumsfeld, he decides that the way he's going to do it, he's going to be the big, he's going to emerge as the champion of the right.
He's going to be the right wing candidate.
And if the whole debate can be shifted to the right, and so all this detente business goes on, and if he makes a name for himself as the enemy of Henry Kissinger, who the right wing hated because he was making these deals with the communists, then he would be the natural candidate, you know, to get the vice presidential slot.
So he, and plus Rumsfeld, you know, the other, if he wasn't trying to become president, it would be just natural for him to intrigue and try and undermine Henry Kissinger because he was a rival for power in the Ford administration.
So he does all sorts of things.
First of all, he aligns himself, of course, with the defense lobby, with the arms lobby and the joint chiefs and the defense contractors, and starts shooting down and undermining, you know, Kissinger's salt negotiations.
He starts immediately pressing for huge increases in the defense budget, which made him very popular with the defense lobby.
And he proceeded from there.
Well, and another obstacle in his way, then, was George Bush Sr., who also wanted to be the vice president.
Well, that's right.
What he did with that, I mean, I should say the way he got after one failed attempt when he was detected trying to undermine the Secretary of the Treasury and get his job, he then persuaded Ford to fire the Secretary of Defense, James Stesinger, and make him Rumsfeld's Secretary of Defense.
But at the same time, just to get rid of this rival, as you mentioned, George Bush Sr., he gets Ford to make Bush head of the CIA, which it was thought, wrongly, as it turned out, but everyone did think at the time that this would be a political death knell for Bush, that once you've been at the CIA, you were kind of out of politics and, you know, only thinking of whatever else, assassinating people, running drugs or whatever.
So that was the general sort of assumption.
So Bush is – so Bush gets made head of the CIA.
Bush realized this was Rumsfeld's intention to take him out of politics and never forgave him.
And the two, they didn't like each other already, but from then on, they were bitter enemies.
I mean, when – Rumsfeld, for years, he was probably a good mimic, Rumsfeld, and he would entertain dinner parties by giving invitations of George Bush Sr.
But then in 1989, just to flash forward for a second, Rumsfeld was kind of not doing much of the time.
He applied to Bush Sr., who had just been elected president, for the job of being ambassador to Japan.
And someone who saw the letter of his application tell her that it was written across it in big, big, sprawling letters was, no, this will never happen, GB.
So Bush never forgave Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld never liked Bush, which makes it all the more interesting that Bush Jr. then hired Rumsfeld to be Secretary of Defense.
Yeah, well, you know, in Bob Woodward's latest book, State of Denial, he basically, I think, makes the case that that's how Rumsfeld got the job, that Jr. said, oh, my dad hates him, he's hired.
Yeah, I mean, I think so, too.
I mean, it was kind of a last minute thing, because they'd had someone else lined up to be Secretary of Defense, who then blew his job interview, because he said he didn't have bottomless faith in missile defense.
So, yeah, it was, you know, there is this complex relationship between Bush Jr. and his father.
And now, back in the 70s, I don't know if, was it when he was the Chief of Staff or when he was the Secretary of Defense, this is where he made his alliance with Dick Cheney and with Richard Perle and the neoconservatives, right?
That's right, exactly right.
Cheney was his, you know, was his assistant.
I mean, he was, no, no, Cheney was regarded around town simply as, you know, Rumsfeld's flunky.
And, you know, as Rumsfeld moved up, he would bring Cheney along as his assistant.
But he also formed what seemed a more significant political alliance at that time, which was Richard Perle.
Perle at that time was an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, and it was a sort of, you know, the birth of the neocon movement, which I outlined at some length in the book exactly what happened.
What the neocon thing essentially was and is, is combining, fusing the Israel lobby and the defense lobby, so that, to the mutual benefit of both, that, you know, the Israel supporters who had been traditionally dovish were persuaded that, you know, ten cents in every defense dollar would go to Israel.
So they, I mean, it became more sort of elaborate than that, but the idea was that they would give their support to higher defense budgets and the arms lobby would give their support to whatever Israel wanted.
And that's how it worked.
And Perle was absolutely the poster child of that movement.
And Rumsfeld, you know, they found common cause.
Rumsfeld regarded Perle as very politically useful to him, and Rumsfeld was politically useful to Perle, and so they got on like a house on fire.
Now, in the 1980s, I guess, was the famous picture, was taken, the famous picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein there in Iraq as Ronald Reagan's special Middle East envoy.
Can you tell us about that?
Sure.
Rumsfeld, I mean, he'd been sexually defensive.
It was kind of odd that he got these rather sort of junior jobs under Reagan, big Middle East envoy, when you've been, you know, you've run the White House and run the Pentagon.
They didn't like him much in the Reagan administration, but they gave him a couple of jobs, and this was the most important one, special Middle East envoy.
And he, you know, his principal mission, or one of his two principal missions, was to go to Baghdad and, you know, cement the US-Iraqi alliance, because the US suddenly got very worried that Saddam was losing the war with Iran.
A war he'd been encouraged to start, by the way, by the US, you know, ended up with a million people getting, well, a million casualties on both sides.
Anyway, so he arrived in, he's told, you know, but your job is to go and, you know, assure, get the Iraqi, assure the Iraqis that they have our support and that we're not going to let Iran win and, you know, you know, and let's all be pals.
So he goes over and, you know, there was the famous picture of him shaking hands with Saddam.
And the Iraqis, the Iraqis were the only people in the Middle East where he liked Brumsfeld.
I mean, no one else did.
The Lebanese thought he was full of garbage.
Yeah, you say in the book, there was one place where they liked him, quote, as a person.
That's right.
Because he was a good listener.
They liked him as a person, thought he was a nice, thought he was very nice.
There was another quote from, actually, that was from Tariq Aziz, Saddam's writer or, you know, there's a foreign secretary at that time, foreign foreign minister.
Yeah, they really liked him in Syria, for example.
They didn't, they thought he was a horse's day.
But the US ambassadors of Syria disliked Brumsfeld so much that whenever Brumsfeld came to town, the ambassador would leave town having locked up the liquor cabinet and taken the key with him.
Anyway, yeah, he and Saddam got on great.
They just thought they loved each other.
And Brumsfeld, apart from, you know, issues of high strategy and all that sort of thing, what Brumsfeld was really doing, he was hustling.
He was hustling for a pipeline the Bechtel Corporation was going to build that would lead from Iraq to the Jordanian port of Aqaba.
But more interestingly, there was going to be a spur from this pipeline leading to Israel.
Just how sort of dimwitted Brumsfeld is that he really thought this had a chance, that he could get the Iraqis to pump oil direct to Israel.
You know, which didn't happen then.
And even now with this, you know, very pro-American puppet government in Baghdad, there's something that still isn't possible.
Well, and if I remember right, I'm not sure if it was something by you or perhaps your brother Patrick at Counterpunch that kind of identified this pipeline deal with Bechtel back in, I guess, the mid 1980s as sort of the beginning of the end of America's friendship with Saddam because he eventually balked at this deal to the degree they could get it done.
Is that right?
Not really.
No, the friendship came to an end for other reasons.
No, the deal, I mean, for a start, as I say in the book, I explained to Brumsfeld that after his first trip to Saddam, he goes to meet King Hussein in London because Hussein was like the King Hussein of Jordan, who was like the key American Arab ally in that part of the world.
And he wants to talk to him about what he's seen, talked to Saddam about and according to someone who was at that meeting, Brumsfeld brings up this idea of a pipeline to Israel and, you know, King Hussein says, you're out of your mind, forget it now.
You know, I'm not going to have a pipeline across my country, pumping oil to Israel, you know, go where, you know, forget it.
So the idea died.
Anyway, no, Saddam, I mean, Saddam at that point was almost promising to recognize Israel.
He was prepared to, not quite that far, but he was prepared to give the Americans most of what they wanted, but not oil to Israel.
So, but then, yeah, that was really, you know, it was thanks to that relationship with Saddam that the Iraqis felt they had, you know, the clearance to go ahead and use chemical weapons on a massive scale in the field, use chemical weapons on the Kurds, you know, led to all sorts of monstrous war crimes.
And of course, they didn't just feel that way.
That was the fact, wasn't it?
That they had American support to do those things.
Yeah, you know, people, I mean, it's something they don't want to talk about, just how massive the U.S. support was for Iraq in all sorts of ways.
I mean, we were getting uniforms for the Iraqi army, in fact, and things like that.
So, but that was Rumsfeld, that was his, you know, he made a lot out of it later on.
Well, for a while he used to boast that he, you know, he put it on his CV that he had helped restore relations with Iraq.
And that came off later on in 1990 in a hurry.
But that was one of his big diplomatic accomplishments.
Yeah, congratulations for him.
Now, this is anti-war radio, so we can't spend too much time on this, I think.
But we've got to fit in here somehow his role in getting aspartame approved by the federal government for human consumption and just what kind of political maneuvering and connections it took to get it approved.
Well, yeah, I should explain the background.
I mean, I'll do it as succinctly as I can.
After he left the Pentagon, at the end of the Ford administration, he got a job running, being CEO of the G.D.
Searle Corporation, a big pharmaceutical company, a Chicago-based owned by people he'd been to school with, the Searle family.
And the company was in very bad trouble because they'd been caught essentially faking their drug tests, or suspected of that, I should say, I suppose.
And they didn't have much profitable products.
The only ray of light was this artificial sweetener called aspartame, which was being held up by the FDA because scientists were suggesting that it gave people brain cancer.
It certainly seemed to be giving rats brain cancer, and they thought it might do the same to humans.
So Rummy's mission, I mean, the thing that could save the company was to get aspartame approved.
And since the studies indicating this was dangerous or rather convincing, it took quite a while.
In fact, he wasn't able to do it until the Reagan administration came into power.
And at that point, he probably told the sales force, his salesman, that he was going to call in all his markers and get it approved.
And what happened was, on the day the Reagan people took office, the head of the FDA was fired, Jerry Goyen, and he was told to leave now.
They put in another guy who'd made his name, well, make his name, but his record included carrying out mind control experiments on U.S. Army recruits, Mr. Hayes.
And Mr. Hayes did his duty and summarily approved aspartame for release.
And shortly afterwards had to leave office because he was discovered to be taking free rides on various people's corporate jets.
And then he got a job as a consultant to G.D.
Searles, i.e.
Rumsfeld's PR firm.
It was a very neat...
Well, what was so bad about the lab tests that they had to fake the results of them?
Well, because they were giving rats cancer all over the place.
I mean, it wasn't just for aspartame, but it probably was just sloppy work in the labs.
I mean, the labs, whether they were making something look better than it was or not, it was just incredibly sloppy.
So that was the thing that they first got caught on.
And then there were these suggestions that they were actually exciting when there were records of various experimental rats getting tumors, that those tumors would then be actually surgically removed from the rats, and the rats would then be reclassified as healthy, which naturally gave the product a better record.
And now this is the stuff that sweetens everybody's mom's diet soda, right?
Yeah, although there's another one that's been overtaken on the market by another one called Splenda.
But yeah, equal.
Well, when you go in any kind of restaurant, when you look at the sweetener bowl, there'll be little pink packets of sweet and low and little blue packets of equal.
And equal is this stuff.
Wow, I hope I don't get brain cancer.
I used to eat packets of that stuff straight when I was a little kid.
Well, better than snorting, I suppose.
But anyway, yeah, just saying.
Well, you sound sane enough to me so far.
Well, it tastes sweet.
It can't possibly give me cancer.
Don Rumsfeld says it's all right.
Exactly.
What better endorsement could you want?
Yeah, I can't think of one.
And now, you mentioned the head of the FDA went to work for G.D.
Searle, but so did a bunch of the federal prosecutors who were prosecuting him.
I think you say in your book, one after another, the prosecutors went to go work for the company they were prosecuting until finally the statute of limitations had just run out.
Well, more or less, yeah.
It's not quite they went to work for the company.
Let me explain.
The FDA had asked when they started finding out all this skullduggery in the G.D.
Searle lab, they requested, the chief counsel of the FDA requested the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago to impanel a grand jury on G.D.
Searle with a view to prosecution.
And so they'd just done this when the chief prosecutor then announced to his staff, or very quietly announced to his staff, after a few months of doing nothing but the grand jury, announced to his staff that actually he was going to go and work for a big Chicago law firm called Sidley Austin, which was the G.D.
Searle law firm.
And so that was the end of his involvement in bringing any kind of grand jury.
And then his deputy is meant to be taking on the case.
He does next to nothing about impaneling a grand jury before he then announces that he's going to go and work for Sidley Austin.
And then the same thing happened with another prosecutor.
So there was a grand jury impaneled finally, but by that time, as you say, the statute of limitations was running out and that was it.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Andrew Coburn.
He's the author of the excellent new book, Rumsfeld, His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy.
And now it's funny because over the past couple of weeks here, as I've been trying to find time to get this book read, I've mentioned to a couple of people about Don Rumsfeld running for president in 1988.
And we're talking to people who are, you know, hardcore political junkies who remember everything that happened politically in 1988.
Say to me, Rumsfeld ran for president?
Are you sure?
Well, he peaked at 2% in the polls, so he could be kind of forgiven, although he certainly did.
Yeah, he declared in 1986 and put together the usual committee and so forth.
And I should say that, you know, as I say, I describe in the book a very interesting conversation he had at that time, which was he called up, you know, he's running for president, so he calls up his old funky, Cheney, and says, OK, I'm running for president.
I want you on board, by my side as always.
And Cheney says, no.
You know, I've got other things to do.
Cheney himself, his political career was actually doing quite well at the time.
He was rising in the Congressional Republican Party and he had his own plans to run for president.
He had transferred his loyalty directly to Satan at that point.
Yeah, that's probably it.
So then Rumsfeld was outraged, outraged at Cheney.
He said to someone who was listening, he said, everything you are, I made you.
What do you think you're doing?
Anyway, so he carried on.
I mean, there was a breach for that.
You know, Rumsfeld went into a sulk with Cheney for some years, didn't really have much to do with him.
But meanwhile, he carries on with the election, you know, and the most interesting thing I found talking to people who'd worked with him, there was one particular sort of very professional, you know, election professional who said he'd worked with a lot of people running for president.
And they all sort of knew a lot.
They, you know, took it pretty seriously, even the ones who had had no chance.
You know, they'd all boned up on what you do in Iowa and how that's different from what you do in New Hampshire and everything.
So the only one who really was completely ignorant and was totally naive about everything was Donald Rumsfeld.
You know, Rumsfeld, I mean, his typical Rumsfeld, he'd been dreaming of becoming president for years.
The papers, he loved, you know, the papers were always saying, well, possible future presidential candidate Donald Rumsfeld.
And, you know, even when he was, you know, when he was off being a businessman, you know, there was continual speculation in the press about his political future.
Then when he finally thinks, no, the time is right, you know, the nation is ready to issue the call to me, he doesn't really know what to do.
And, you know, his speeches were incredibly boring.
And there was one former Chicago, Illinois politician, Ed Dawinsky, who was a longtime congressman.
His theory was, he said, Rumsfeld's too short, you know, surprising for those who've only seen Rumsfeld on TV to realize he's only just over five foot eight.
I mean, it's really, it's probably the most startling fact I discovered about him the first time I saw him.
And this, Dawinsky suggested, he said that, you know, alongside the other candidates, he said Rummy was the runt.
And people looked at this little guy and just thought, you know, not him.
Anyway, for whatever reason, his campaign went absolutely nowhere.
And he took one last, and to make it worse for him, the guy who did do well, of course, was George Bush, which was especially galling for Rumsfeld.
And so he did made one last attempt to betray Bush, I mean, to undercut Bush by endorsing Dole.
But that didn't make much difference to anything.
So then, as I say, he went on to, you know, he went on to playing president.
But first, we can talk about that later.
Yeah, well, and before we really get to the disaster that has been the Bush administration's military policy for these last few years, we really got to do the 1990s here real quick.
Can you can you fill me in on his ties with the military industrial complex through various lobbies and which corporations he's most close to and that kind of thing?
Well, he actually, in a way, we have rather a good picture of his ties to the military industrial complex in the list of defense docs he had to submit to the government ethics, Office of Government Ethics, and the Senate when he finally got made secretary had been millions and millions and millions of dollars invested in defense stocks.
His ties were like, you know, they were both financial in the way I've just described, but also political in that he, you know, he's partly via, partly directly and partly via his old alliance with the Neocons.
He was, you know, he was just ever willing and happy to carry water for the military industrial complex, and he did that most notably in the late 1990s when he, there was two Congressionally mandated commissions, one on ballistic missile threats to the United States and the other on, you know, military uses of space.
And in both cases, they were both appalling documents when you read their final reports because the missile defense, the missile one was, you know, as a way to promote, make a case for missile defense, and it's full of them as sort of absurd threat inflation and wild speculation and, you know, sort of trimming of facts and evidence, but it was all designed to say, you know, there's a terrible threat.
They, North Korea was the big threat, and the North Koreans cooperated by launching a missile, having a missile test, which actually failed, but still it was a missile test just after the report came out.
So that got, you know, that worked fine.
I mean, the CIA very obligingly changed, the CIA before had said there was really effectively no ballistic missile threat from North Korea or Iran or anywhere else.
They, you know, obligingly changed their assessment to say there was, you know, and it, you know, helped lay the case for this, you know, the huge boost in missile defense spending that the Bush people brought in when they, when they arrived.
And the other one was on the militarization of space, which was less, sort of got less prominent, but that's costing us many billions of dollars too.
So he was, you know, he did his duty as a, as a flack for the military industrial complex.
And you did just bring up, and I guess we can get to it presently, the fact that when he couldn't become president, he decided what he would do is play president in the war games.
And you write in your book that in every, in every opportunity that he possibly had, he destroyed the whole world.
That's right.
Yeah, it was all part of this super-duper secret program, which actually still exists, called Content Unity of Government, COG, and they, you know, it's all to do with how, you know, after, after the enemy has struck and the, you know, the White House has gone up in smoke and so forth, you know, how do we carry on the government?
And they had these exercises, they have all these secret headquarters, military headquarters around the place.
So the, the, they would have these exercises where they would get people like Rumsfeld, and particularly Rumsfeld, to play president or play, you know, play, to head the emergency government.
And Rummy loved doing it.
I mean, other people, Cheney was involved too, but Cheney, even Cheney would sometimes miss, miss an exercise that he was, you know, going fishing with the family or something, never Rummy, he loved it.
He was always there for everyone.
And what these exercises were in two parts.
I mean, there's two things you were trying to play out.
One was reconstitution of the government.
It was really about testing communication links and things like that.
And then, you know, reconstitution, and once you've done that, retaliation, you know, getting on with the war.
And Rumsfeld apparently quoted people, other people who took part, Rumsfeld always wanted to skip reconstitution.
He thought that was kind of boring and get on with retaliation.
And even when there was an option to sort of like deescalate and maybe, okay, you know, there was a few nuclear craters around, but maybe we can stop this thing.
Rumsfeld always wanted to go to the max and blow up the, blow up the world, as you said.
My goodness.
And had that story been reported previously anywhere else?
No, absolutely not.
I mean, it had been reported that he took part in these exercises, but not what he actually did in them, which I thought was the interesting part.
Yeah, absolutely incredible.
And I, you know, give an account of one exercise, just as an example.
I guess we have to consider ourselves extremely lucky.
Yeah, mop your brow.
Yeah.
Mop your brow.
He never got into the Oval Office.
Well, I mean, even the fact that he was the Secretary of Defense all those years, I mean, this guy is truly a madman, isn't he?
Well, I'm madman.
He's just like he's a very sort of, first of all, the biggest sort of, people said, you know, have asked me, did working on the book change your opinion of him?
It did.
I don't know if I liked him much.
I mean, but I always thought he was, until I started working on the book, I thought he was smart, you know, in a sort of low, cunning way.
But I came to the conclusion about halfway through that he's actually pretty dumb.
How many have a sort of ability, you know, he has a sort of courtier's instinct for intrigue and backstabbing and sort of maneuvering himself for position.
But, you know, in terms of understanding what's really going on, he's, you know, he's...
He kind of takes that same attitude as George Bush, that he already knows everything that there is to know, so get out of his face.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, they're very similar.
They both, you know, they both have this ability to size up a weakness in someone and play on that.
But they're both sort of bullies.
So, yeah, I don't know, madman, I'm not sure.
I mean, he's really, he's very, he's a very frivolous person, intellectually frivolous.
I mean, he makes this big deal of being, you know, one intellectually is how he reads all the time.
But it's clear, I know from talking to a lot of people who work with him and, you know, just see what he did, that he didn't really like to involve himself in, you know, getting to understand any kind of intellectually challenging puzzle.
And people, you know, the briefing, when someone went to brief him, you know, someone's going to brief you on a complex subject, you basically shut up and listen.
You know, you might learn something.
His main idea in any kind of encounter like that was to prove that he was smarter than the other guy, so he'd interrupt all the time with sort of off-putting questions, you know, just to throw the person off balance.
So not surprisingly, he didn't actually learn all he should.
Yeah.
And now, when the Bush team first took power and the spy plane was forced down, I guess, by the Chinese, he pushed for a belligerent response against China, who are, in fact, armed with hydrogen bombs and three-stage missiles, right?
That's right.
That's right.
He was very influenced by the various people, advisors, the gurus he has, who for a long time have been very sort of, you know, hyped up about the Chinese military threat.
So he was primed to do that.
So, yeah, when this was in April 2001, the Chinese had forced down an American spy plane.
It was a big diplomatic tension, and he was all for, you know, belligerent response, upping the ante, you know, forcing, don't know if he wanted to get a war, but, you know, certainly a very dangerous course of action he wanted to do.
But fortunately, actually for the last time, the State Department, Colin Powell, actually managed to get Bush to side with them and, you know, agree to a diplomatic response, which worked.
Right.
And what you said, I think, in the book was probably the last time Colin Powell won anything.
Yeah, that's right.
After that, after that, he was toast.
I mean, Brumsfield, you know, he was kind of pathetic Powell.
I mean, he, I guess he'd been a kind of, you know, he'd been a horseholder so much of his life that when he actually had a position of power and influence, he just wouldn't use it.
I mean, he could have, he could have stopped all sorts of things.
I mean, he had tremendous moral authority in the early years of the Bush administration, which he never used.
Right.
He instead chose to just be a tool to use that moral authority to bolster the case that his enemies were making.
Yeah, I have no sympathy for him whatsoever.
Yeah.
Now, one more thing on China here.
I thought it was interesting.
You write in the book that Wolfowitz got himself installed on this whitewash commission to play down the military industrial complex selling high tech missile technology to the Chinese.
But if I remember right, wasn't it Wolfowitz's good buddy Scooter Libby, who was the counsel for the Cox Committee, that turned the whole argument around and blamed it all on China and Wen Ho Lee and all that?
That's right.
Exactly right.
You know, Scooter and Wolfowitz go back.
I mean, Scooter worked for Wolfowitz in the Pentagon in the first Bush administration, 89 to 92.
And yes, Scooter was, you know, that Cox Commission and, you know, actually, Wolfowitz collected a ton of money.
What was it?
$300,000?
A lot of money from the Hughes Corporation to lend his name to this sorry exercise and get them off the hook.
Yeah, that was a real nest of these people.
Yeah, that was an amazing story.
I remember it.
Unfortunately, it was all during the same time as the Monica Lewinsky.
So yeah, you know, a real crime as opposed to.
Yeah.
Well, the story went from from Bill Clinton and these corporations gave all this technology to the Chinese in exchange for all this money, even though basically it was illegal.
In fact, I think it was even John Wong approving the licenses in the Commerce Department.
And then they spun the whole story around and said, oh, China has mounted this spying operation on us.
And then eventually they blame this one Taiwanese guy who apparently was innocent of all charges.
That's right.
That's right.
That was amazing spin the way they got away with that.
I'm sorry.
I just.
You're right.
People should remember this.
It's an important little slice of our history.
OK.
Now, we talked about 9-11 at the beginning.
And you know that that when our hour's up, I'm going to beg you to stay on longer.
We talked about 9-11 and Rumsfeld's failures there.
But let's get to the war in Afghanistan.
Bin Laden and Zawahiri's escape from Tora Bora.
The resumption of the opium trade, the evil warlords who skinned people alive who are now our allies, that kind of fun stuff.
Well, that's a lot.
The essential point about the relation, what I talk about Rumsfeld in relation to Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld, he wanted, he had this sort of half-baked ideas about transforming the military, and he didn't really have much clue what to do.
But more or less by accident, I mean, the Taliban fell.
I mean, you know, there was a very quick campaign in Afghanistan.
And Rumsfeld concluded it was all because of him.
Because for various reasons, they didn't have any troops in Afghanistan, partly because the army refused to send any.
But, you know, so the war was, as far as the Americans were concerned, was fought with bombs, precision-guided bombs and missiles, and special forces people on the ground, you know, illuminating the targets for them.
That was the American military thing.
Meanwhile, the CIA is going around with sacks full of $100 bills paying off sort of local strongmen, warlords, to defect from the Taliban.
That was more, that had much more of an effect.
But what had the greatest effect of all was the Pakistani intelligence people sending a message to the Taliban saying, listen, you know, this is, we're getting too much heat from the Americans.
You better lie low for a while, you know, just pull, pull, pull out.
Yeah, and you're right.
Let's stop right there and emphasize that point.
This is something that, Jesus, as much as I've read about Afghanistan, I don't think I've ever read before that the Pakistani ISI explicitly told the Taliban, hey, give up, retire, I think is the word you use in the book and fight another day.
Yeah, which is exactly what happened.
I mean, if you look at it, there wasn't any fighting or very little.
And actually, I know from my brother, Patrick, who was in Afghanistan, was, you know, was covering that war from the, you know, from the northern side, from the northern line side.
And he said it was interesting as the Taliban front sort of collapsed and the Taliban all sort of, you know, withdrew from their positions fairly rapidly, it must be said, he made a point of going to the hospitals.
You know, it's what war correspondents do, you know, we're going to find, find, find what's going on, you go and see the wounded.
The hospitals were mostly empty.
I mean, certainly of war wounded Taliban, because, you know, there hadn't been much fighting.
The bombing, you know, wasn't the major decisive point about the whole operation.
It was, you know, it was the Pakistanis.
Anyway, so but Rumsfeld concluded from all this that he was a military genius.
Yeah.
And that his masterful planning, he'd shown the military were wrong, he'd imposed his will on them, and they'd won the war in record time.
So after that, there was no stopping him.
I mean, he, he was going to, you know, conquer Iraq in the same way.
And, you know, when they, I do say, I mean, so, you know, he refused to let them send that many troops, and he mucked about deployment orders.
And that's, in a way, that's unfortunate in two ways.
One is they probably could have done with some, you know, slightly better organized invasion.
But two, it gave the army a, you know, an excuse, which is only now wearing out, that anything that went wrong in Iraq was all Rumsfeld's fault, because he wouldn't let them have enough troops.
In fact, as I argue, it's plainly clear that, you know, the troops in a lot of case, you know, that the more troops there were, the more insurgency you had.
You know, where the, where there were a lot of forces around, like in Fallujah early on, which was, I remember Fallujah from my trips to Iraq in the 1990s, it was kind of a hillbilly town.
They were, you know, they were, they were, I wouldn't necessarily left my wallet lying around there, but I mean, they weren't, there wasn't a big bar this town, it was very sort of tribal area.
But the first thing that happened there was the, you know, the occupation forces would establish themselves in a schoolhouse, a high school in the middle of Fallujah.
And on April the 13th, midway through, soon after the fall of Baghdad, anyway, the locals are having a demonstration, had a demonstration to protest about the occupation of their school, they wanted their school back.
And the troops inside, the Americans inside, opened fire.
They claimed they'd been shot at, which I'm dubious about, killed 13 people.
And after that, then the fat was in the fire in Fallujah.
So, you know, more, the argument that more troops would have stopped the insurgency, I think is very much open to question.
Right, yeah.
Maybe there is no way, no good way to aggressively invade and topple a country and reform its government.
You're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
But I mean, you know, there's two little troops.
There are lots of, you know, there are bad ways, there's no good way, but there are worse ways to do it.
Whatever the worst way was to do it, you know, the invasion forces did.
Oh, and you know, I'm sorry, I just found this on my notes.
And I'm sorry to have to backtrack one conversation here.
But when you talked about how few Taliban were found by your brother injured in the hospital from the fighting and that, this is something that has been reported before here and there.
I think Newsweek reported on it and Democracy Now, of course, has done a great job on it.
But this is also something that you mentioned that, and in fact, I think this is the first time I've heard this, that the majority of Taliban dead were those who were suffocated in the back of trailer trucks.
Well, that's right.
That was, you know, they surrendered, a large group of them surrendered in the north and were just stuffed into container, you know, container trucks and, you know, taken off to suffocate.
That was a large part of their casualties.
That was the horrendous, you know, that was the work of our trustee Northern Alliance allies.
And then there was some of the whole story of John Walker Lind, which I describe, I mean, and how, just to say quickly, I mean, Lind, I hadn't realized until I looked into this that Lind was the first time we can connect the torture of someone, an American citizen, indeed, as young John Walker Lind was, with a, you know, direct authorization from Rumsfeld's office.
You know, they just captured Lind and he gets an office, a message arrives from actually the Rumsfeld's lawyer to say, take the gloves off in interrogating him.
Right.
And report back every hour.
And so, well, no, let's stay with that for a minute.
So this is Rumsfeld, in a sense, directly supervising the torture of an American citizen in Afghanistan?
Well, I can't prove it was Rumsfeld because actually the message came from Haynes, his lawyer, the Pentagon Council.
I mean, it did sound, I mean, I can't believe Rumsfeld wasn't, you know, in the loop on this.
Right.
But in view of what happened later on, it's certainly a reasonable conclusion that he was.
And now this is all based on the theory that the Taliban, even though they were signatories to the Geneva Convention, that somehow, I guess, because we had just defeated them, they weren't a state anymore.
And so their signature didn't apply.
And so, therefore, the torture rules didn't apply anymore.
I know, it's amazing, isn't it?
It's just horrifying the way these, you know, it makes the American into a gangster state.
You know, when you get the government just sort of ripping up international law, ripping up treaties, you know, ripping up, you know, their domestic constitution, ignoring, you know, torturing American citizens, you know, that broadened its home.
It just, you know, it's what's so completely terrifying about what we've been living under.
Okay.
Now, I guess we're just going to have to skip North Korea entirely.
And we really got to get more into Iraq.
But quickly, Israel and Palestine, you write in the book that here's this issue that is always the concern of the State Department, perhaps the National Security Council, not the DOD.
And yet somehow Donald Rumsfeld made the Pentagon the agency most influential in America's policy to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Well, that's right.
He got in.
You know, this is something Israel-Palestine was never a thing for DOD, for the Pentagon.
He got, he did a bureaucratic maneuver early on where he got Rice to agree to say that, you know, that that should be part of the, the DOD should be included in the interagency process on that.
And Powell began to sort of fool, you know, let that happen.
And then there he was.
He was doing, you know, he was, you know, got on like, he had close relations with Sharon.
They thought they loved each other.
I know I can say that, you know, that there was a very heavy Israeli presence.
I mean, Israeli-Israeli as opposed to Israel support, American-Israel supporters, but Israeli presence in the Pentagon in Rumsfeld's time.
They were in there all the time, particularly in Douglas Fyfe's office.
And now you have what sources of information we've read, of course, Karen Kotowski talking about chasing as much as escorting Israeli generals to Doug Fyfe's office.
You have more information about that?
Well, I can confirm that, that they, it was in Fyfe's office, but they also, I mean, that they, they made it clear, the Israelis who are coming in, the Israelis now like to say, they're putting out, you see, there's been a lot of, you know, leaks saying the Israelis, oh, the Israelis told the Bush administration, no, invading Iraq is a bad idea.
You shouldn't do it, you know, we will support you, but really our private advice to you is not to do it.
And of course, you know, they were ignored.
Well, that's baloney.
You know, they really did egg them on and they made it explicit that they thought, among other good ideas for it, was that this would take attention off this pesky peace process.
You know, there would be less, you know, they wouldn't have to, Israelis hate the peace process, so they, that's as much as it is, which isn't much.
And therefore they were relieved, they thought, you know, a good war in Iraq would, you know, mean people would lose interest in these things.
The other point to bear in mind is that, as I say, is that Ahmed Chalabi, you know, the Iraqi exile who found his way into a warm place in the hearts of the neo-cons here, partly because he told the neo-cons and people like Wolfowitz and Powell that the moment he came to power in Iraq, if they would invade Iraq, get rid of Saddam and put him in charge, he would instantly open relations with Israel and, you know, fulfill Donald Rumsfeld's old dream of shipping oil direct to it.
Right, the pipeline to Haifa.
The pipeline to Haifa would be there.
So they, you know, they fell for it.
Well, and of course the CIA and the DIA now say that they believe that Chalabi was an Iranian spy whose job it was to help lure the American people into the war in Iraq, because as it should have been obvious to anyone and certainly was obvious to the Iranians, they would be the big winners if America toppled the Baathists.
Well, yeah, I mean, I personally think Ahmed Chalabi works for Ahmed Chalabi.
Yeah, well, there's that too.
But he's, you know, he's always been a sort of Shia nationalist.
But yeah, he's, you know, I mean, how anyone could argue otherwise?
I mean, he had to, you know, if you're going to be a player in Iraqi politics, apart from anything else, you have to have warm relations with Iran.
I mean, the idea that, you know, this demented idea these people had that, you know, somehow he was our guy and was not in bed with the Iranians was completely mad.
And I think, yeah, I came across evidence that a while ago that Chalabi, some of the, you know, false information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction way beyond all the stuff we've heard about recently, but way back in the early 90s, I found there was a document which allegedly shows that the Iraqis were continuing with a nuclear program, despite sanctions, which was presented, found its way to the, you know, the UN people.
I think, I mean, I say I'm pretty sure via Chalabi and it came from Iran.
It was a forged document, you know, allegedly an Iraqi document, but it was clear, some people who did some, and Iraqis who analyzed it were able to show, because of certain words that were used, this had an Iranian origin.
Is this the same plot where Manasur Gourbannafar was manufacturing some documents that implicated Iran and Iraq both?
No, I guess not, if the Iranians were behind it.
Yeah, there's so many of these forged documents and nuclear accusations, it's hard to keep track of them all.
I'm talking with Andrew Coburn, he's the author of Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy.
Scott, I'm sorry to say, I looked at the time, I've got to hold you to your words.
Okay, I'll let you.
I wish I'd spent more time on Iraq rather than the past with Don Rumsfeld.
Perhaps we can continue this conversation and do a part two.
By all means.
By all means.
Okay, great.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
Andrew Coburn, the book is Rumsfeld, his rise, fall, and catastrophic legacy.
Thanks again.
You're welcome.