Andrew Cockburn’s Rumsfeld Revelations (Truthdig)

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Posted on Mar 15, 2007



The storied journalist speaks to Truthdig about his new book “Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy,” which offers fresh insight into the real force behind the Iraq debacle.

Transcript:

James Harris: This is Truthdig. James Harris, Josh Scheer, on the phone a man who’s written for The New York Times, The Times of London, the author of the new book “Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy,” let me welcome Andrew Cockburn to the show. How are you today?

Andrew Cockburn: Pretty good. Nice to be with you.

Harris: Now in your book you say his “rise, fall and catastrophic legacy.” In your mind what’s the most catastrophic part of his legacy?

Cockburn: The obvious candidate ... the headline is Iraq ... the ruin of an entire country and along with it the ruin of a good part, a good chunk, of our military and not to mention the lives and limbs of a lot of our young men and women. So, you know, that’s the obvious one, and ... you know that deserves the place of, and I wouldn’t say honor, place of disgrace. But beyond that what he did was he took the whole, you know, what was already a bad situation with our military and our entire defense and made it infinitely worse.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Five years ago or six year ago when he came into power we had 80 major weapons programs, most of them designed for, to fight the Soviet Union ... to fight a country that doesn’t exist anymore, a total cost of $750 billion. We got the same weapons systems, no more relevant now than they were then, but now he ran the cost up to one and a half trillion dollars. That’s just, I mean that’s just part of the exploding defense budget out of control that he left us that we and our children and children’s children will be paying for for generations to come.

He brought the military into a domestic role, to a far, far greater extent than it’s ever been before. In other words we have, now we have military intelligence deeply involved in domestic surveillance, in monitoring antiwar demonstrators and monitoring progressive types. I mean it’s, we have the NSA, which is a military intelligence agency, now tapping our phones. It’s the most sinister development. And beyond that, or besides that and perhaps most horrible of all, he really institutionalized torture. I mean it’s been reined back a bit, theoretically, but he OK’d torture, he encouraged torture, he encouraged the stripping ... of Geneva Convention protections from enemy prisoners. And even, as I talk about in the book, he even was practicing, or his chosen favored command within the military, Joint Forces Command, was actually practicing new refinements in sensory deprivation on an American citizen in a jail on American soil. ....(more)

The complete piece, in transcript and audio forms, is at: http://www.truthdig.com/interview/item/20070315_andrew_cockburns_rumsfeld_revelations/