Rumsfeld: I Should've Left the Pentagon in 2004
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with ABC that his biggest regret during his time in the Bush administration was failing to convince President Bush to accept his resignation in 2004 in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
The photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq were a "damaging distraction," Rumsfeld said in the interview, which is airing in segments this week.
"That was such a stain on our country," he said. "To think that people in our custody were treated in that disgusting and perverted and ghastly way -- unacceptable way."
Rumsfeld submitted a letter of resignation to the president on two separate occasions that year, but he was convinced to remain at the Pentagon. He eventually left in 2006.
"There wasn't an easy target," he said. "And so I stepped up and told the president I thought I should resign. And I think probably he and the military and the Pentagon and the country would've been better off if I had."
In the interview, the former Defense secretary defended the enhanced interrogation techniques he approved, such as forced stress positions, but he said he never authorized harsher tactics, such as the sexual humiliation or prolonged sleep deprivation used on the so-called "20th 9/11 hijacker" Mohammed al-Qahtani at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
"I didn't approve any of that," he said. "And when I found out that they had done some of those things, the people who had done things that had not been approved were dealt with. They were stopped and prosecuted."
In a portion of the ABC interview that aired Monday night, Rumsfeld gave a critical assessment of his Bush administration colleagues, former Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
