Donald Rumsfeld was loathed by the first Bush president, but under Bush Junior, largely to slap his father in the face, Rumsfeld became the architect of Iraq, including the US's stance on torture. In late 2006, Rumsfeld was ceremoniously sacrificed by Bush Junior. An interview with Andrew Cockburn, the author of "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy".

The public scrutiny of Rumsfeld culminated in his resignation following the 2006 elections, when the Republicans lost control of Congress. "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy" is his biography by investigative journalist Andrew Cockburn. Cockburn relies on sources that include high-ranking officials in the Pentagon and the White House and chronicles Rumsfeld's early career as an Illinois congressman, through his rise in the Nixon White House, from his tenure as CEO of pharmaceutical company G. D. Searle to his decisions as Defense Secretary in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amy Goodman: What is Rumsfeld's relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney?

Cockburn: Well, it's a key relationship in the history of our times. It goes back to the Nixon White House, when Cheney went to work for Rumsfeld, when Rumsfeld first moved over there from the Congress. And in those days he was regarded by anyone who encountered them as very much Rumsfeld's flunky. And he rose with Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld put him out to pasture when he went off for a job in Europe for a couple years, but then brought him back as his deputy in the Ford White House.

But then, actually, interestingly, I discovered, to my surprise, that during the years in the relative wilderness for Rumsfeld, when he was out of office and decided to run for president, which he always thought he was the person most fitted for that job, in 1988, he called on Cheney and said, you know, 'Report for duty, Cheney.' And Cheney, by this time, had his own political career and refused. And Rumsfeld took tremendous umbrage at this and went into a deep sulk and actually wouldn't speak to Cheney for some years. And then, of course, the partnership was reforged, with disastrous effect this time around.

Goodman: What about Rumsfeld's relationship with George Bush, Sr.? Why did the former president dislike Rumsfeld so intensely?

Cockburn: They were basically rivals, first of all, at the court of Richard Nixon, because they were each sort of protégés of Nixon, and each found ways to court Nixon's favour. But then, in the Ford administration, they were rivals for the slot. They both wanted to be picked by Ford to run with him in 1976. And Bush suspected, entirely correctly, that Rumsfeld had sabotaged his chances by getting him made head of the CIA, which was thought - wrongly, as it turned out - to have politically neutralized Bush for the rest of his career.

And the loathing continued. Rumsfeld used to give very sort of cruel imitations of Bush. He would entertain dinner parties with his renditions of Bush's style of speaking. And then, when Bush was elected president, Rumsfeld applied for a job as ambassador to Japan. Bush wrote across the letter, 'No. This will never happen. G.B.'

Goodman: So what does it say about George W. Bush, that one of the few men who were in that circle that his father despised, he made one of his top key people in his own administration?

Cockburn: Well, isn't that very interesting? It tells us a lot about the relationship between the two Bushes. We've heard this before, that there was an antipathy certainly on the younger Bush's side towards his father. Unless we get him on the couch one day, we'll not really find out where this came from. But it's certainly there. But there's so much anecdotal evidence of him expressing resentment, like his famous remark that he didn't pay attention to his own father, but he answered to a higher father, as he told Bob Woodward. So it's there. And how can one not assume that the appointment selection of Don Rumsfeld to be his Defense Secretary was, in a way, one more jab by the son toward the father?

Goodman: There is something that most people may not be aware of and that's a very significant part of Rumsfeld's life, which is being the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Searle and his links to aspartame.

Cockburn: When Rumsfeld left office with the Ford administration in January 1977, he signed on first as a consultant and then as CEO with G.D. Searle, which was then -- it's since disappeared - a very major pharmaceutical company and was owned and run by people he had been to school with, the Searle family. And the company, at that time, was in desperate trouble. The belief on Wall Street was that it was going under, because they had been rather badly managed and they were facing a major grand jury investigation for what - to put it in kind terms - was misleadingly reported drug tests on new products. So the grand jury was about to open fire on them.

So they appointed Rumsfeld. And the only ray of light for the company was this artificial sweetener called aspartame, which they discovered by accident, but seemed to have great potential. But there was, again, a problem, which was that the FDA was responding to the views of a lot of scientists who thought that it gave people brain cancer. So it was not releasing it. So Rumsfeld's major mission while he was in that job was to get this stuff released - approved for release for sale to the public, which he finally managed to do, but only after the Reagan administration came in, whereupon the FDA commissioner was promptly fired, and someone more obedient was put in, who, of course, approved release. So that's how Rumsfeld made his money and earned his reputation, as a capable businessman, which a lot of people dispute.

Goodman: You state that Donald Rumsfeld got involved with condoning, laying the groundwork for the memos around torture.

Cockburn: If you really want to go to the beginning, I think it's that he's a rather harsh individual. But you have to remember, in that job he was in alliance with the neoconservatives, who had been saying for years that we must take the gloves off with terrorism, not let the rule of law interfere. After the September 11th attacks, there was a predisposition to go down this route.
And we can see it very early on in Afghanistan, when, for example, when they captured the unfortunate John Walker Lindh, the American youth who had joined the Taliban. Instructions arrived from Washington immediately from the Office of the General Counsel at the Pentagon, who was essentially Rumsfeld's lawyer, saying take the gloves off in interrogating this young man, which they certainly did.

There's a paper trail, most significantly or most vividly, perhaps, a December 2, 2002 memo signed by Rumsfeld that approved a whole bunch of torture techniques. They call them counter-resistance techniques, and there's all sorts of euphemisms for them, stress positions, sleep depravation, harsh noises, all the sort of dreary or the repellent sort of litany of things they've used that have become famous since, particularly at Abu Ghraib. He approved them.
We know that, actually, this was specifically intended for the use against one particular prisoner, Qahtani, who was in Guantanamo, who they thought was the twentieth hijacker. And we know from an internal investigation later that Rumsfeld was personally involved in monitoring the interrogation, which was a torture interrogation, of this one particular prisoner.
So then, in Abu Ghraib, after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, these same techniques were then transposed there on Rumsfeld's direct order. Not only that, we know from court testimony - or as I describe, court testimony in the case of the lower-ranking people, who are the only ones who have been tried on this matter, that Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who's done his best to tiptoe away from all this but was very much involved, were actually in regular contact with Abu Ghraib, with the prison, to see how the interrogations were coming on. So his fingerprints - and I chart this - are all over this repellent practice.

Goodman: In Germany, the Center for Constitutional Rights have gone to file suit against Donald Rumsfeld, other high-ranking officials, including Alberto Gonzales, General Sanchez and General Miller, as well, who headed Guantanamo, then went to Abu Ghraib to, as they say, 'Gitmo-ize' Abu Ghraib. The significance of this, how Rumsfeld responded to this, how he dealt with questions from President Bush over this?

Cockburn: Well, of course, he denied it. He's always tried to deflect blame for any of this often on the ranks of subordinates, which is what he tends to do. And when there was an investigation in response to complaints from FBI men at Guantanamo at the treatment of many including Qahtani, Air Force Lieutenant General Schmidt, who actually interviewed Rumsfeld on this specific issue of Qahtani, Rumsfeld actually sort of joked about it. I mean, it's absolutely disgusting. He said, 'Oh, did I really give orders to put a bra on this man's head and make him dance with another man?' to which Schmidt replied, 'Yes, you did, sir.' It's Rumsfeld all over. He will, time and time again, I found that he will order something, he will call something to happen, and then when he's questioned on it, he will seek to blame others.

Goodman: Can you talk about Rumsfeld after the attacks of September 11th?

Cockburn: He sort of became famous. He was in decline at that point. He was doing very badly at the Pentagon. Then, on September 11th, he was famously advertised as having gone out, rushed out to help the wounded. Well, what actually happened was that Rumsfeld actually had gone on, rather like Bush listening to My Pet Goat, he had gone on with his normal day. His bodyguard had realized that something actually was up and was waiting outside his door to take him somewhere, to some bunker somewhere.
When the plane hit the Pentagon, Rumsfeld emerges from his office and sets off, without a word to anyone, without telling any of his command staff where he was going, to have a look. They wander through the building, and eventually they find the crash site. He does help push one gurney, one stretcher, across the grass for a minute or so. And then it dawns on him that maybe he's in the wrong place. Meanwhile, the radio, the guard's radio, is erupting with messages saying, 'Where's the secretary? Where's Mr. Rumsfeld?' because he was the Secretary of Defense. The country was under attack. He actually had a job to do. But, of course, they couldn't go back, get back, because those frequencies were jammed, to say, well, he's here. So for twenty minutes, he was completely out of touch.

Meanwhile, Cheney, in his bunker under the White House, was busily ordering passenger planes to be shot down all over the place. So he contributed materially to the whole dysfunctional reaction to the attacks, and then finally wandered back, got to his command post, actually only fifty minutes after the plane had had hit the Pentagon, and finally began issuing what turned out to be totally irrelevant orders. So really, I'd say, it was rather a typical day for Rumsfeld. He was in the wrong place. You know, he didn't do his duty and concerned himself with irrelevant matters.

Goodman: Why did you choose to write this book? And, as you did it, what surprised you most?

Cockburn: It was clear to me that this man, even beyond what we generally thought, had this immense power. For years, there he had been. He had been one of the most powerful people in the world. And really, beyond a few sort of impressions and some myths peddled by himself, like helping the wounded on 9/11, we really didn't know that much about him. One senior White House person I talked to about him, I said, 'Well, is he really that powerful?' He said, 'Are you kidding? He gets to spend half the discretionary budget of the United States government, and he has a total veto on foreign policy. How powerful is that?'

What surprised me most was how incompetent he was. I mean, what a poor manager. Among the myths peddled about him was he was this no-nonsense efficient CEO, an American business hero, basically on the basis of his time with the drug company. So what I found time and time again was how sort of useless he was, that he sprayed memos everywhere - he called them snowflakes - ordering people to do this, that and the other thing. But, actually, after a while, the bureaucracy realized that if you paid no attention, nothing much happened to you, because there was never any follow-through. And he used to send out a hundred a day, so, of course, he had no time to find out if anyone had paid attention.

Goodman: In 2006, you write that George W. Bush said to his father, 'What's a neocon?'

Cockburn: That's right. One of the rare moments of some sort of communication between the two. They were out at Kennebunkport, and Bush Jr. says, 'Can I ask you a question? What's a neocon?' And the father says, 'Do you want names or a description?' The President says, 'I'll take a description.' He says, 'I'll give it to you in one word: Israel', which is interesting on all sorts of levels, including the confirmation that our president doesn't really read the newspapers.

Goodman: How do you know that this conversation took place at their vacation home?

Cockburn: Well, I can't really say who told me, but it's someone who was-- I have absolute confidence in both in their - that they're telling the truth and also in their position to be aware of this conversation.

Goodman: You had Rumsfeld playing a war game after George H.W. Bush became president, playing the President.

Cockburn: He played numerous war games. When he couldn't become president himself, he decided to act the part, so he took part in secret high-level Pentagon war games, where they rehearsed what happens when there's a nuclear attack. And other parties, other players noticed that Rumsfeld, instead of getting on with what he was meant to be doing in this game, which was reconstructing the country, reconstituting the government, he was all for blowing up the world. I mean, he was all for instant massive retaliation to incinerate the eastern hemisphere, is what he really liked doing.

> Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!  Andrew Cockburn is the author of "Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy."