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Former American President George HW Bush has publicly criticized Dick Cheney and Donald H Rumsfeld, key members of his son's administration, in a biography due out next week. Mr Cheney, Mr Bush said, built "his own empire" and Mr Rumsfeld "served the president badly," US media report. Mr Bush also called Mr Rumsfeld "an arrogant fellow" with "swagger".

"The fact that he is dead--as opposed to captured and in custody--is a good thing. The complications of what you do with him, how you retain him, detain him, and then the question of where do you interrogate him--the complications would have been enormous, particularly for this administration which seems to agonize over each of those questions in a way that always ends up, or almost always ends up, causing long delays in the decision making and then reversals of position," former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Laura Ingraham today.

Chief of Staff of Donald Rumsfield tweeted OBL has been killed. Perhaps this is Obama's new speech coming soon?

Bill Cowan, a counterterrorism expert without partisan baggage, talked annually since 2003 with former Free Lance-Star columnist Rick Mercier about Iraq, Afghanistan, and the larger War on Terror. Editorial Page Editor Paul Akers last month conducted a fourth interview with Cowan, before the Nov. 7 election and the subsequent departure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A former Marine lieutenant colonel, Cowan runs a security firm, WVC3 Group, and offers commentary and analysis on network news channels. He maintains close contacts with the military, intelligence, and diplomatic establishments, synthesizing what he hears into highly informed opinions about a dangerous world. Paul...

(CBS) An American general caught up in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal is now at the center of a new controversy involving allegations about her past, but she's calling it a smear campaign. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who claims she has been made a scapegoat for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, is the subject of an investigation by the Army Inspector General involving an alleged shoplifting incident in October of 2002, one year before the abuses began, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin. According to military sources, Karpinski was caught shoplifting a $22 bottle of perfume from a...

White lies? Since when is it OK for a president to lie to reporters? Wasn’t it just last week that the president told reporters that both Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were staying on their jobs for the next two years? It was an important question. The president didn’t duck. He didn’t give one of those mealy mouthed, we’ll see answers. He said yes, they’re both staying. And even as he said it, they were getting ready to get rid of Rumsfeld. He must have known that. He hadn’t talked to Gates yet, but Gates was being vetted for the...

Rumsfeld's cranky outburst mangles a historical analogy, bad-mouths legitimate critics, and illustrates once again why the defense secretary should resign. August 31, 2006 TWO REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATIONS ago, the mantra of conservatives was "Let Reagan be Reagan." Apparently President Bush has decided to let Rumsfeld be Rumsfeld — even when Bush himself is no longer the Bush who taunted Iraqi insurgents with "Bring 'em on!" and posed in front of a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished." ADVERTISEMENTIn a cranky speech Tuesday to an American Legion audience, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld compared critics of U.S. policy in Iraq to those who...

Donald Rumsfeld has a notorious vindictive streak. How low will he stoop to pursue it? Let's put him to the test. If he wanted to get really brutal, Rumsfeld could convene a court-martial and prosecute the six retired generals who have been calling for his head. Military law, if read literally, permits him to do this. So, will he? One of the assumptions surrounding the recent criticism of Rumsfeld is that the retired generals, unlike active-duty officers, are free to criticize the defense secretary without fear of reprisal. Surprisingly, this assumption is untrue. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice,...

WASHINGTON - Everyone is saying that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s days are numbered, thanks in part to increasing calls by some former generals for Rumsfeld’s resignation. But Rumsfeld was hired by George W. Bush to do precisely what he has done to the consternation of the generals who are now coming out to complain about him. When President Bush brought Rumsfeld back to the Pentagon, the president told him to shake up the Pentagon, to transform it from the Cold War structure and culture that it was stuck in to a new force with strategies that could respond to...

So The New York Times has found six generals who want Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign. The peace party often makes a show of embracing the martial virtues, though they should be careful what they ask for. People often suspect a ruse, and the uniformed front men that come forward are not necessarily top quality. In 1864, at the climax of the Civil War, the Democrats tried to unseat Abraham Lincoln with “the young Napoleon,” Gen. George B. McClellan. McClellan had commanded the Union’s armies, but chafed at the civilians under whom he served: He called Lincoln a...

Once again, the leftists are ramping up their campaign for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, just so they can use the word “embattled” in a sentence. The media have tried to tie every military misstep in the War on Terror directly to Rumsfeld as a way of discrediting President Bush, blaming him for every problem from helicopter crashes to Abu Ghraib. Their political purpose is so obvious that the main result has been a general dwindling of trust in the media. Of course, Rumsfeld has already offered his resignation at least twice, but President Bush refused to accept...

WHAT'S the dumbest thing George W. Bush could possibly do right at this moment - the action that would, more than any other, suggest his presidency was and is all but finished? The answer: Fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Either a forced resignation or a dismissal would effectively bring the Bush presidency to an end. This is something that Bush's out-and-out foes and opponents of the war in Iraq surely understand, otherwise they wouldn't be salivating over the prospect and doing everything they can to put pressure on the president to make it happen. But some supporters of the president's...

The US Army had begun conducting an analysis for a full-scale war with Iran involving missile strikes, a land invasion and a naval operation to establish control over the Strait of Hormuz much before its forces went to war with Iraq in early 2003, a former intelligence expert said Sunday. His comments come close on the heels of President George W. Bush dismissing news reports that his administration "has been working on contingency plans for war -- particularly talk of the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons against Tehran" -- as wild speculation. Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld also called...

“The plan has been through the combatant commanders, it has been through the National Security Council process. General Myers and General Pace (chairman and vice-chairman, Joint Chiefs) and others, including this individual, have seen it in a variety of iterations. When asked by the president or by me, the military officers who’ve reviewed it have all said they thought it was an excellent plan. I stand by the plan…I think it’s a brilliant plan.” Donald Rumsfeld on the plan for Operation Iraq Freedom, March 30, 2003 NewsHour. ....................................... Who said this? What if Saddam fails to comply (with UN sanctions),...

Rummy will be interviewed by Laura Ingraham shortly.

The London-based Arabic newspaper Al Quds is reporting in its Tuesday edition that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld secretly met former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during a surprise visit to Iraq two weeks ago. The purpose of the meeting, says the newspaper, was to seek Saddam's "assistance" in calling off the stepped-up attacks by Iraqi insurgent forces. More than 75 Iraqi military and civilians have been killed since a new government was formed in the war-torn nation. In return for Saddam's "cooperation," the U.S. was willing to "resurrect" an offer made by President George W. Bush in March 2003. Namely,...

Donald Rumsfeld explained today what has always seemed to us to be one of the decisive factors in some of the problems faced in the occupation of Iraq: Turkey's refusal to allow US forces to pass through and attack Iraq from the north, allowing a pincer movement on the capital. The level of insurgency in postwar Iraq wouldn't be so high if the U.S.-led coalition had been able to invade from the north, through Turkey, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday. Rumsfeld told "Fox News Sunday" that if the United States had able to get its 4th Infantry Division...

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cancelled a planned visit to Germany after a US human rights organisation asked German authorities to prosecute him for war crimes, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) has learned. Rumsfeld has informed the German government via the US embassy that he will not take part in the Munich Security Conference in February, conference head Horst Teltschik told dpa on Thursday. The New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights filed a complaint in December with the Federal German Prosecutor's Office against Rumsfeld accusing him of war crimes and torture in connection with detainee abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Rumsfeld...

Defense officials say that the Donald H. Rumsfeld-John McCain relationship, never the closest or friendliest, really soured at a private meeting the two had last summer. The strong-willed defense secretary and the equally hard-nosed Republican senator from Arizona, both ex-Navy pilots and hawks on Iraq, were supposed to make peace over two nagging issues. Mr. McCain did not believe Mr. Rumsfeld was adequately paying attention to, or disclosing information about, the Boeing tanker lease scandal Mr. McCain took to the Senate floor Nov. 19 and read e-mail excerpts and called the Boeing deal "a case of either a systemic failure...

There has been so much violence in Iraq that it's become hard to distinguish one senseless act from another. But there was a picture that ran on the front page of this newspaper on Monday that really got to me. It showed several Iraqi gunmen, in broad daylight, without masks, murdering two Iraqi election workers. The murder scene was a busy street in the heart of Baghdad. The two election workers had been dragged from their car into the middle of the street. They looked young, the sort of young people you'd see doing election canvassing in America or Ukraine...