In My Time - Dick Cheney [222]
In Pakistan, again due to tremendous work by our intelligence professionals, A. Q. Khan had also been put out of business. We had taken down his network. On February 4, 2004, he’d gone on Pakistani TV and confessed to his illegal nuclear proliferation activities. He was under house arrest, and we had stopped one of the world’s worst proliferators of nuclear weapons technology.
Finally, terrorists around the world now understood that the United States would strike at those who intended us harm. We had done all these things—and kept the American people safe from another attack.
ON MAY 10, 2004, President Bush and I went to the Pentagon to view photos that had recently been made public, as well as some that hadn’t been released, of American soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. The photos were deeply disturbing. The behavior recorded in them was cruel and disgraceful and certainly not reflective of U.S. policy. Secretary Rumsfeld had testified in front of the Senate and House armed services committees a few days before our visit to the Pentagon. He apologized, took full responsibility, and promised a complete investigation. He had also tried to resign on May 5. He believed someone had to be held accountable, and since the behavior had occurred on his watch, he offered the president his letter of resignation. The president hadn’t accepted it.
As our May 10 Pentagon meeting came to a close, Don asked to see the president alone, and as President Bush told me when we got back to the White House, Don tried to resign for the second time, saying this time his mind was made up. The president asked me to talk to him, to explain how much we needed him, and to convince him to stay.
The next day, Tuesday, after the weekly Republican Senate Policy Lunch at the Capitol, I headed to the Pentagon to talk to Don. As my motorcade crossed the Potomac, I thought back thirty years to the day in 1975 when Jerry Ford had directed me to contact Rumsfeld to persuade him to accept the job of secretary of defense. How could I have ever imagined that five presidents later, I would be urging him not to resign from that office—which in the interim I had held myself?
I took a seat at the small round table around which I’d held nightly senior staff sessions when I was secretary. Don was by the standing desk he kept near the window. I told him I understood why he had submitted his letter of resignation, but that he was wrong on this one. We were in the midst of a war against a very tough and determined enemy, and his departure would undermine our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan. I told him that I believed his resignation would do serious, perhaps irreparable, harm and asked him to reconsider. In the end, he agreed to stay.
Ultimately those responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib were reprimanded, relieved of duty, and, where appropriate, prosecuted. There were a dozen independent investigations conducted of detainee policy on Rumsfeld’s watch, and none found any evidence that abuse was either ordered, authorized, or condoned by military authorities or senior officials at the Department of Defense. One of my greatest regrets about Abu Ghraib is the focus it put on a relatively small group whose actions were in such marked contrast to the deep and enduring commitment to duty and honor that I have observed time and again in the men and women of America’s military. The wanton abuse committed by those few soldiers did lasting damage to America’s image, but they do not represent our country or the men and women who defend it.
MY FIRST MAJOR POLITICAL speech of the 2004 campaign was at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Mrs. Reagan could not have been more gracious, the audience was friendly, and the day before I made the speech, Senator John Kerry had provided me with some very good material. Asked about his vote against an $87 billion