Rumsfeld Twice Offered to Resign

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed Thursday that he twice offered President Bush his resignation during the height of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal last year. He said he wanted the decision on his future to be placed in Bush’s hands.

“He made that decision and said he did want me to stay on,” Rumsfeld told CNN’s “Larry King Live” on Thursday.

In the interview, Rumsfeld said that as Defense secretary he could not be expected to know all that took place in war zones halfway around the world.

But he also indicated that he could have done more to head off the trouble.

The release of photographs last spring showing U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib triggered worldwide outrage, particularly among Muslims. Rumsfeld told Congress at the time that he would quit if he felt he could no longer serve effectively, but he also said that he would not resign simply to please his critics and political opponents.

In the CNN interview, he indicated that he felt a measure of responsibility for the scandal.

“The problem is, this kind of thing occurs in prisons across the country and across the world,” he said. “And you have to know it’s going to be a possibility. And therefore the training and the discipline and the doctrine has to be such that you anticipate that risk. And clearly, that wasn’t done to the extent it should.”

Some had speculated last fall that if Bush was reelected he would replace Rumsfeld, but in December the president said he wanted him to stay. Rumsfeld told CNN that when Bush asked him to stay for a second term, they did not discuss whether it would be for the full four years.

At a news conference at the Pentagon on Thursday, the subject of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal arose in a different context. Rumsfeld said he may skip an appearance at a security conference in Germany next week because of a lawsuit there accusing him of war crimes for the prisoner abuse.

“It’s something that we have to take into consideration,” Rumsfeld said when asked whether the war crimes lawsuit was a factor in weighing whether to attend the Munich Conference on Security Policy, an annual gathering of government defense officials, lawmakers and others from Europe and around the world.

Rumsfeld said he had not made a decision on whether to attend the two-day conference, where an address by the U.S. Defense secretary typically was a highlight. Last year, Rumsfeld defended the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which was highly unpopular in much of Europe.

“Whether I end up there we’ll soon know,” he said Thursday. “It’ll be a week, and we’ll find out.”