Rumsfeld tortures truth in Known and Unknown

Donald Rumsfeld, much loathed and despised as a perpetrator of war and torture, has a message for the world: Don't blame me. That turns out to be the theme of his upcoming memoir, Known and Unknown, extracts of which appeared yesterday in the American press ahead of the book's publication next Tuesday.

Even the title is as misleading as the casus belli for the invasion of Iraq that the former US Secretary of Defence orchestrated for President 'Dubya' Bush. There is very little that is unknown in its 815 pages, but an awful lot of spin on what is known, and which did so much to despoil America's standing in the world.

A sprinkling of previously unknown tidbits, however, are profoundly revealing, although not in the way intended. In a book which is all about policy, they offer an insight into the man.

Rumsfeld writes that in the period just before 9/11, when the White House and security services fluffed it, he was distracted because his son, a drug addict, had relapsed and disappeared.

Later when he makes his notoriously insensitive claim that Iraqis had looted treasures from the national museum in Baghdad simply because "stuff happens", he reveals that he was under stress because his wife, Joyce, was in hospital with a ruptured appendix.

In other words, wife and son are to blame.

What sort of man is this who cannot focus on the mounting threat of history's most savage terrorist attack, or the fate of a conquered city, because he is preoccupied with his family?

But another anecdote suggests this 'family man' excuse is bullshit. Rummy was in his office in the Pentagon when one of the planes used in the 9/11 attacks exploded into the building. His office filled with smoke, and he had to evacuate with everyone else. He walked, he writes, with the wounded.

Twelve hours later, his spokeswoman, Torie Clarke, asked him whether he had called to comfort Joyce, to whom he had been married for 47 years. He had not.

"You son of a bitch," said Clarke.

"She had a point," writes Rumsfeld.

Nothing was his failure or his fault. Why did he fail to catch Osama bin Laden and his cult when they did run away to Tora Bora? Rumsfeld denies the subsequent assertions of both CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks and CIA director George Tenet that they asked for clearance to sweep Tora Bora.
 
"Perhaps," Rummy writes, "their recollections may be imperfect." That is a euphemism for lying.

Rumsfeld confirms once again that Bush was intent on war with Iraq immediately after 9/11, despite the lack of evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the attacks.

He describes how Bush called him to a one-on-one meeting in the Oval Office just 15 days after the World Trade Centre was reduced to rubble, leaned back in his leather desk chair, and asked "that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq".

And, he adds, the commander-in-chief  "wanted the options to be 'creative'."

To Rumsfeld there is no connection between that preoccupation and the subsequent falsehood of the principal justification for the war with Saddam: the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

"The president did not lie. The vice president did not lie. Tenet did not lie. Rice [Condoleeza] did not lie. I did not lie. The Congress did not lie. The far less dramatic truth is that we were wrong," he writes.

And, needless to say, the various intelligence agencies were responsible for them getting it wrong.

The need to transfer blame is leavened with some settling of scores. Colin Powell, Secretary of State, gets a pasting for claiming that he was misled into making his infamous claim of evidence of WMDs to the UN, which made Rumsfeld look bad.

Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Al Gore get bashed for their hypocrisy because they supported the WMD claims and the war when the nation was baying for blood, but turned on Rumsfeld and Bush when things went bad.

He quotes their statements of support. "Yet when opposing the Bush administration's efforts in Iraq became politically convenient," he writes, "they acted as if they had never said any such thing."

At least he is more-or-less right on that one. But is Paul Bremer, the 'viceroy' on the ground in Baghdad, really to blame for disbanding the Iraqi army and unleashing sectarian mayhem? Was the White House public relations department really to blame for Bush's notorious 'Mission Accomplished' stunt, when the President posed as 'top gun' to announce 'victory' just as the Iraq bloodbath began?

The greatest stain left on America's reputation remains the descent into torture. At least Rumsfeld stands by his support for that - if, of course, torture is really torture when perpetrated by Americans.

He did not condone the abuse of prisoners by US military guards at Abu Ghraib jail - and indeed his one regret, he claims, is that he didn't persuade Bush to accept his resignation at the time.

But he remains adamant that Abu Ghraib was the result of rogue soldiers and not policemen he helped draft – ignoring evidence to the contrary gathered since by human rights groups.

He still defends the use of waterboarding and all those other "enhanced techniques" employed at Guantanamo Bay, but one of his "biggest disappointments" was his failure to "help persuade America and the world the truth about Gitmo".

The truth? That word in that context epitomises the problem with Known and Unknown. It is some time since America and the world believed in Rumsfeld's version of the truth, and this book offers no reason for a change of mind.

'Known and Unknown' is published by Sentinel (Penguin) on February 8. ·