WASHINGTON DC, USA – There are lots of questions that lots of people would like to ask former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But right now the only “known known” is that he is not answering any.
Unlike his old mate, the former vice president Dick Cheney, who is far more visible and far more vocal than he ever was when he was in office, Rumsfeld isn’t giving any interviews or talking in public to anyone. Not even to us when we tried to grab a word with him outside his house yesterday morning.
If he’d given us some time we’d have loved to ask him if he can still claim the humiliating abuses of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison can be blamed only on a “few bad apples” now that we have the Office of Legal Council memos that show exactly the same kind of practices and techniques – forced nudity, threatening use of dogs and horribly painful stress positions – were prescribed from the very top.
Surely it can’t be a coincidence that these are exactly the same things that we see Iraqi prisoners forced to do in the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures?
President Obama may have decided not to release thousands of other photographs from other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan that will show these kinds of practices were widespread.
But whether or not we ever see the pictures we do now know for sure that this sort of thing was happening in numerous US military jails. What would Rumsfeld say about that if we were able to ask him about that? “Stuff Happens”?
There are numerous questions thrown up by the new information we have about “enhanced interrogation techniques” about who knew what and when.
What about the latest revelation that orders were coming from the top of the Bush administration that a captured Iraqi intelligence officer should be waterboarded in 2003 to try to persuade him to reveal a link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein?
What did Rumsfeld know about that? We may never know if he keeps up his vow of silence. We don’t think he is staying home to write his memoirs either. It would appear the man who once used to so enjoy arguing with the press at Pentagon briefings is determined to keep his mouth shut.
When he did venture out last week to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner he was ambushed by a couple of women from the multi-purpose protest group Code Pink. Yelling at him, he is a war criminal and that he’s responsible for the death of millions of Iraqis.
The first protestor is taken away by security but they missed a second who followed him down the stairs toward the VIP champagne reception announcing the arrival of a “war criminal” for quite some time before anyone makes a move to take her away. You can see it all here.
It seems remarkable that anyone can get so close to the former defence secretary. Especially when you consider that every former Northern Ireland Secretary used to get lifelong special branch protection. Surely Rumsfeld lives under a similarly serious terrorist threat?
But when we turned up outside his house in Washington DC yesterday morning there was no sign of any special security.
No one stopped us as we set up our camera opposite his house. Within the hour the man himself opened his own front door to collect his morning newspaper. We ran across the street to ask him if he would give us an interview. And backed off after he gave us a pretty decisive NO. But anyone with any kind of agenda could have got just as close.
In the report we put on TV we took care not to make it too obvious exactly where he lives and, of course, did not show the licence plate of his car.
But we didn’t find it very hard to get hold of his address and I am sure anyone else who wanted to approach him in the street – whether to shout war criminal or anything else at him – could equally easily find out where he lives. Just don’t expect to get any answers from him if you see him.